Gabe's post on Murray's article talks about how we can put the theory into practice. He finds that by valuing the entire process and not just the "final" product we can relieve some of our students' stress and look at how they go about the process of writing and critical thinking. Gabe has practiced some of these things in his class and finds that they have been successful in that they give students something to take away with them. Bravo for small successes! His story of the classroom is a very interesting one. You can read it here.

Courtney does an interesting connection between Murray and SRTOL in her post. She seems intrigued with Murray's notion of "discovery through language" and what that means under the lens of SRTOL. Good question. She writes, "One of the strongest claims in the article is the assertion that through the analysis and shaping of their own writing, students engage in this process of “discovery through language,” naturally." This is an interesting idea, as students work through the writing process they also make new discoveries? Could this be critical thinking? Could this be why we guide students with developments and broader scope questions in our evaluations of their writing? Interesting thought :-)

Matt's post talks about his writing process, he states that he feels bad for making students do planning work because he doesn't do it himself. It may be true that some people don't do much planning and prewriting, but in my experience it is usually the people who have the most writing experience that can effectively "cut to the chase". Most first year composition students have done little, if any, writing of extended arguments and this is the reason that we give the option of doing the full writing process by teaching them how to do it. It is true that doing an annotated bibliography is an important part of the prewriting process for a research based paper but there are times when outside research is not necessary and students must turn to other methods of prewriting. It is then that having working knowledge of the steps of the writing process is invaluable. Is planning 85% of the writing process as Murray states? Maybe not...probably not. Students tend to spend a lot more than 15% of their writing time writing and rewriting.

Laura W. shares the story of her own bouts with the writing process. Many of us are "meticulous" (and strapped for time like our students) and try to make our first draft our only one. But over time we learn that if we look at the grand scheme of things there is never a "final" draft only a more finished one :-). Laura talks about the one-time response papers that we assign, I like to think of these (and the in-class exercises) as a part of the writing process. In-class writing assignments are a part of the pre-writing stage, the stage where we think about what it is we have to say on the subject. The respponse papers are a part of the drafting stage, they are a more polished version of pre-writing. It is here that we have an opportunity to start to form an argument or analytical piece that, in a utopian world, could be further developed into a fuller draft of an extended argument or analysis. The method to the madness is that by working on all of these things students are practicing the various steps of the writing process.

Laura P. writes that she does not really agree with Murray but reading her posts makes me think that there are parts of Murrays article that are already a part of her teaching and evaluating practices. What is the purpose of commenting on student papers and offering developmental questions? To help them in their revision. Why do we hope that they read them? Because we have spent so much time actually responding to them and because of the fact that we hope that we, as evaluators, can help them to become better writers. For me this is all a part of the process model, we are just stepping in to guide the process a bit. Initially, we may have to teach them the steps of the process because as "new" writers many of them are unaware of the steps of the process. But more than being "writing teachers" we are being "process facilitators"...Just a thought.

Adrienne's post focuses on Murray's idea of grading the unfinishedness of the product so that the process and not the product becomes the important thing. She asks the age old question "Do teachers not have some responsibility to teach students the standard that will be expected of them in larger society" ? This is an age old question (okay not quite) and an important one. The answer to this question is a personal one and one that we must all make as informed teachers. There are arguments that say yes and those that say no but how we ultimately answer this question will be based upon our knowledge and analysis of the theory of the field. Is it possible to teach students what is "expected" of them and still value the process over the product? Is the product more important than the process? Is there a happy medium to be struck? Good questions.

Cat found Murray's article on writing as a process interesting but wishes that someone would counsel students on writing as a process. In this month's Harper's magazine (which is dedicated to teaching) there is an article by a basic writing teacher and he writes that the best way he could describe writing to his students was to tell them that it was more like golf than history because writing is not something you learn (like dates) but something that you learn to do. Perhaps if we stress to our students that writing is something that you can only learn to do by practicing and doing drafts the whole idea of writing as a process will be clearer.