Writing Process

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The Deliberate and the Driven

To be college and career ready writers, students must take task, purpose and audience into careful consideration, choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

They must have the flexibility, concentration, and fluency to produce high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline and the capacity to revisit and make improvements to a piece of writing over multiple drafts when circumstances encourage or require it. (“College and Career Anchor Standards for Writing” 63)

Reading the Common Core State Standards, teachers of writing come away with a mixed message. Writing is described as rich in thought and content, but sometimes it is quick and dirty and sometimes it is careful and reconsidered. Both are true, but  it leaves open  the question of how to teach writing.

The above passages, from the  CCSS sidebar titled “Range and content of student writing,” illustrate how our national standards for writing are torn between the deliberate and the driven. In the first sentence, the words “careful consideration” and “deliberately” stand out.  This emphasizes that writing is a process. In the second sentence, the key words seem to be “high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline,”  which suggests the need for a “quick and dirty” approach.  However this is followed by a disclaimer which urges the “capacity to revisit and make improvements to a piece of writing.”  Then,  lest we become too leisurely in the process of writing, the final phrase cautions “when circumstances encourage or require it.”

The beauty of these contradictions about “range and content of student writing” is that they are probably all true. Writing is both deliberate and driven, according to the purpose and occasion. It would be petty to insist that the standards for writing be unwavering and consistent, because writing is not like that.

What does annoy me is that we assess only the “driven” side of writing, the world of desperation and deadlines. The language about “high-quality first draft text” is an obvious rationale for the impromptu essay, written in thirty minutes or less and unapologetically assessed as “first-draft writing.” This how the ACT, the College Board, and most state assessments evaluate writing.   The question is “Of what social or professional value is first draft writing?” Or “Why be driven?”

Some professional roles dictate a “high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline.” Newspaper reporters come to mind.  Office scribes — secretaries, document drafters, those who write for their bosses — may be required to write under short deadlines.  For some reason, this remarkable skill is often uncompensated and yet under-girds the other forms of writing that allow newspapers to publish and businesses to function.  It is a valuable skill, but not always valued.

Every other kind of writing falls under the “capacity to revisit and make improvements,” and it is the kind of writing most respected in journalism and commerce.  Feature articles, Op-ed articles, Topical columns, Investigative articles. Project or marketing proposals, contracts, human resources documents, end-user documents, public relations documents.  No one writes these in one draft or under unreasonable time constraints. Oh yes, deadlines will sometimes be sudden and arbitrary, but no one considers high pressure the formula for good writing. And writing in journalism, law and business is incurably collaborative. Numerous pairs of eyes must examine work in progress and editors may insist on putting their mark on it, even a controversial comma.

In the “real world” the writing process is alive and well and respected. Only in school is it considered a sideline, producing the kind of writing pored over by teachers, but rarely high stakes, rarely a standard for “success.”  The writing that counts is “driven” writing.  It is the kind of writing most students claim they are good at.  Why? Because that is the kind of writing we assess for success.  To many students the quickwrite is the money genre, the one that counts.  Students who claim they can write well, but need time, seem to be asking for special consideration. They are somehow deficient because their writing process is an actual process.

To be college and career ready writers, students must take task, purpose and audience into careful consideration, choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

Deliberation. To me that describes what writers really do.  It comes from a Middle English word meaning to “balance or weigh.” Writers balance “task, purpose and audience . . . words, information, structures and formats.” That’s a lot of balancing, and it will not be easily executed in thirty minutes. It will be executed  . . . deliberately.  Writing teachers’ message to their students is to “trust the process.” The message of our standardized assessments is “Get ‘er done.”

. . . choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

It is comforting to see deliberation validated in the Common Core State Standards. It gives dignity to writing and the teaching of writing.  Now if it would only be reinforced by the Common Core State Assessments. The Deliberate . . . not the Driven.

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Due Process

When last I ranted about the Draft of the National Standards for Writing (8/2/09), they had spurned narrative and its disreputable cousins, ownership and voice, they had snubbed “genre,” preferring instead “structures” and “formats,” and they had dismissed the process of writing in short order, with no acknowledgement of “metacognition,” “reflection,” or “portfolios” to support it. A year later, the Core Standards have mellowed a bit, and so have I.  Considering the ultimate document “Common Core State Standards: English Language Arts and Literacy in History/ Social Studies and Science” I’ll gladly give credit for some improvements.

Of course, I will return to ranting about the shameful neglect of the writing process and indicting the Standards, as soon as I have given them their due process in court.

In the final version of  the Common Core Standards, Narrative has ascended to a “Text Type,” juxtaposed with “Argument” and “Informative/ Explanatory Texts.” This is a respectable promotion from its former status as a “Sidebar.”  The Narrative standards include engaging the reader, developing narrative elements (“with purposefully selected details that call readers’ attention to what is most distinctive or worth noticing” – Grades 11-12, # 1b), and attending to the writing process, including “trying a new approach.”   These all seem to be concessions to critics who attacked the narrowness of the Standards and their neglect of the craft of writing.

The final document also lays a significant burden on History/ Social Studies and Science  for addressing discipline specific skills in writing.  Not only are the content-area teachers enjoined to support the same modes of discourse cited for English Language Arts, they are required to guide students in “writing-to-learn” (“Write in response to informational sources, drawing on textual evidence to support analysis and reflection as well as to describe what they have learned,” Grades 11-12, #10).  This latter remarkable standard is an excellent example of a “process goal,” one which allows writers to move from reading a text to reflecting on it, before eventually incorporating it into an “argument” or “informational/ explanatory text,” which are the “product goals” of writing. “Writing in response to . . .” is a “process goal,” because it has no intrinsic value to the reader other than showing the writer’s understanding of a text at that moment.

The identification of “process goals” really opens a Pandora’s Box for the Standards, because in every other case they collapse the writing process into one single standard, forever known as #5- “Strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting or trying a new approach, focusing on addressing what is most significant for  specific purpose and audience.”  In every place in the document, this statement (always numbered “5”) subsumes a multitude of skills that promote the writing process.

Thus, the English Language Arts Standards for Writing, 9-12 make no mention of “writing in response to. . .” anything, because they are fixated on products. All the intermediate forms of writing, from journals to learning logs to exploratory writing to reflective writing to blogging are ignored, because they are hidden in the process of producing higher-profile “formats,” such as a critical analysis of  “A Modest Proposal” or an argument against one of the Federalist Papers.  The Standards writers have a very “bottom line” view of the writing process, and, of course, it is a view entirely consistent with the values of the marketplace.  “Process” documents have very little marketable value, unless you are already a best-selling author, and everyone wants to know your secret to great writing.

This disregard for the process would be fine if writing were manufactured like iPhones or Toyotas, but writing grows out of a rich subsoil of pre-writing ( alluded to as “planning” in #5).  Donald Murray, the patron saint of the writing process, estimated that 85% of the writing process is pre-writing.  His discipline was to write in a “daybook,” and he drew ideas for articles and books from the seedlings of his daily writing.  This suggests that the Standards address only 15% of the writing we do in school each year.

I’ll admit that my daily writing does not approach Murray’s.   And I accept the chastening of Jenna McWilliams, who has observed of my blog,  “The writer published only seven posts in eight months (all of which were excellent, btw), and the last post went life a full two months ago. No audience has the patience to stick around through gaps that big”  (http://www.jennamcwilliams.com/?p=215).  So much the worse for my writing.  I could write more, better write more and will write more or turn in my poetic license.

Learning to write involves relentlessly writing and reflecting on the process and product. It involves commenting on writing (our own and others’), taking risks with writing, and self-assessment of our writing. This is not the message of the Standards on Writing.  Rather, they roll the process into a tight little ball by asserting about writers, “They must have the flexibility, concentration, and fluency to produce high-quality, first-draft text under a tight deadline, as well as the capacity to revisit and make improvements to a piece of writing over multiple drafts, when circumstances encourage or require it” (“Notes on Range and Content,” p. 37).  Between the lines of these “Notes” is an impatience with process, a sense that it is a luxury that the marketplace and the university can ill-afford. It also discriminates against the struggling writer, who relies on a process of acquiring habits and critical standards to move beyond a basic literacy.

To borrow from the legal culture that infuses the Standards, I do not feel writing has received its “due process” in this document.  As much as Standards represent the verdict of K-12 learning, they must also reflect the deliberation that produces the verdict. No attorney would claim the verdict was the most important element of a legal dispute and neither are the products of writing more important than their processes.  Writers must learn a process, not the mere format that emerges from the process. Therefore, the Standards should include the discourses of pre-writing, of feedback and of reflection that support the writing process.  They should advocate for the process-based pedagogy that makes everyone a writer, not merely the privileged, the writers by birthright.