Of pre- and post-process: Reviews and ruminations

Composition Studies, Fall 2001 by Fulkerson, Richard

And a third course was required, a traditional literature-based writing class. I enjoyed it, met a teacher who would become a mentor for me as I later migrated from math into English. In addition, she was the first teacher who had ever told me to write to a formula-the five-paragraph essay. We were to underline the thesis in the first paragraph and put brackets around the topic sentence of each body paragraph. This was the first time anyone had told me I needed to have a thesis. I had never heard of the form before, and it made writing a lot easier. Naturally, this too was a process-less course.

Only later in my career did I run into courses that were even more pre-process or non-process, courses built on in-class impromptu writing-- a topic students had not known about in advance, fifty minutes to outline and write, followed by marking (in teacher code based directly or indirectly on The Harbrace Handbook) with a grade. I'm proud to say that in almost forty years as a writing teacher I have never done that to my students.

So what is my point (beyond an exercise in personal nostalgia)? There really is a distinction worth making between product-based classes and process-based classes, although variations certainly fall along a continuum. Jim Berlin dismissed the distinction when he wrote that "everyone teaches the process" (777). Obviously in one sense he is correct. My first-year courses, and the teachers I later observed giving impromptu essays, did "teach" a "process" of sorts. It was linear and truncated: choose a topic, outline, write, and proofread if necessary. Even the "outline" wasn't essential. Basically pre-process teaching constructed writing as an "act"-not an extended, complex process, not a process of "discovering" meaning or something worth saying, not a recursive, messy procedure, but a simple set of activities that any competent writer could perform "on demand."

Writing was rather like riding a bicycle. If you knew how to do it, then you could demonstrate your ability on demand. Hence the idea of inclass and time-limited writing, including my final-exam-as-researchpaper. Of course, there were degrees of ability; some rode/wrote more gracefully or faster than others. And there were different writing/riding situations-long flat rides/writes, short sprints, uphill climbs, and easy downhill narratives. And there were a few variations, such as learning to switch from a "regular" bike to one with gears, or switch from a pedal brake to new-fangled handbrakes. And some riders/writers were not in the best shape, while others flew along the page/path, perhaps even performing stunts and earning style points during the act of writing/riding. Of course those who are not in shape need exercises.

Nowadays, the leading thinkers in composition seem to me to share the following view of our recent history. There were the bad-old days. I have been calling them "pre-process." More often they are described as the period of "current-traditional" rhetoric (following Young who took the phrase from Fogarty), or what Maxine Hairston, borrowing from Thomas Kuhn, called "pre-paradigmatic." But then came the "process revolution," and amid much feuding at least a quasi-paradigm for the field was formed.