Of pre- and post-process: Reviews and ruminations

Composition Studies, Fall 2001 by Fulkerson, Richard

One reason some of the most up-to-date folk in composition studies are now critiquing "writing as process" and saying that we are now "post process" is the linear orthodoxy implicit in this account of how one "teaches" writing as a process, even while acknowledging that writing processes vary and are anything but linear.

Is "Process" Equal to "Expressivism"?

In one of the longest essays in the Tobin and Newkirk volume, and for my money the most useful and insightful, Mary Minock argues that the "writing process movement" was a peculiar "marriage" of James Britton's "expressive developmental theory" with American expressivism and American faith in miraculously rapid progress. So the idea that many other discourse genres were based developmentally on the child's use of self expression (Britton) became built into a curriculum for college students in which the expressive/narrative/freewriting from early in a semester "develops" into the end-of-course academic argument-a narrative we might call "The development of writing abilities: September to December." Although there was a political "logic" to allying the two positions, since both opposed current-traditional or formalist teaching, the marriage belied what was most essential to both views. Minock points out that Berlin in his first of several taxonomies did not classify Britton and Moffett as Expressivists. Nor did I.

Tobin discusses the tendency to associate expressivism and process in his introduction to the collection: "there is not a necessary connection between process pedagogy and personal writing, that is a teacher could assign a personal essay but ignore the writing process or assign a critical analysis yet nurture the process" (6), yet having said it he notes, "the two have often been linked in practice and perception" (6). He leaves the issue there.

Ede remarks on a related matter when she alludes to "the substantial diversity of the activities that are often lumped together under the rubric of the writing process movement" (36), and elaborates, saying, "A class structured around freewriting and personal narration differs substantially from one that emphasizes structured heuristics and academic writing, for instance, yet both approaches have been cited as examples of 'process' teaching" (36). Again, perhaps, the distinction between the expressivist and rhetorical wings of the WAP.

In one of the most helpful essays in Taking Stock, Robert Yagelski ponders the problem of whether a process approach to writing is theoretically justifiable in the light of postmodern criticisms. As he notes, if writers have no individual "agency," "the process approach to teaching writing would seem to be a sham" (204). He interweaves his own story of being a New Hampshire graduate assistant, and working with Don Murray, with postmodern critiques of "process" by Berlin, Clifford, and Jarratt. And he points out that such critiques "problematize the notion of 'individual' or 'subject' as often conceived in expressivist discussions" (207). He concludes that these critiques are not really about the "idea that writing is a process," but about political implications of "expressivist" conceptions of writing and the "self" (208). He notes that even Berlin, in discussing his preferred social-epistemic rhetoric said, "This effort locates the composing process within its social context" (qtd in Yagelski 208).1