process writing 1

Everyone complains of our young people’s inability to write clearly and effectively. Employers complain that the young men and women who graduate from our high schools or our colleges cannot write. Teachers in other subjects complain that their students cannot write reports, and teachers in our own field complain that students come from the high schools or the elementary schools poorly prepared. And let us not forget that the students themselves are fully aware of their inadequacies, though they are usually too polite to blame anyone but themselves.
Many rationalizations can be offered for this state of affairs: the lack of time for instruction in writing, the overcrowding of our schools, the democratization of education, bringing students with poor backgrounds in English into the schools and colleges, the widening gulf between the written and the spoken language, and even the movies, the comics, and television. Granting the effects of all these in making our problem harder, I think we must still suspect that our failure to teach students to communicate well is in large part a failure in our teaching.
I believe the basic failure in our teaching centers, in my judgment, in our unwillingness or incapacity to think of writing in terms of process. Too many teachers, in spite of new developments in pedagogy, still think of communication in terms that static, atomistic, non-functional. And such thinking will continue to produce unsatisfactory results.
The most fruitful developments in pedagogy in our field are all based on concepts of process. Recent semantic theory conceives of meaning in terms of stimulus and response rather than clearly defined and fixed areas of meaning attached to individual words. Scientific linguistics conceives of language and its usage as constantly changing, continuously influenced by and influencing the complex and fluid culture of which it is a part. Recent developments in propaganda analysis and in literary criticism stress the connotative or psychological and emotional aspects of meaning in communication, often finding these more crucial in pragmatic terms than denotative, dictionary meanings. The common denominator in all these developments is the concept of process.2 In the teaching of reading and speaking a good deal of progress has been made toward thinking in terms of process and accomplishment has probably been more effective than in our teaching of writing. In this last area we still lag far behind, in my opinion, and my purpose now is to describe a way of thinking functionally about writing as a process. It will easily be seen how the concepts carry over to oral communication and to the receiving as well as to the transmitting end of the process. Purpose is at the very center of the writing process; everything else is subservient to it. This should be obvious enough to anyone, though it is amazing how readily we forget it. Unless a communication is purposeful, it is nothing, a meaningless exercise or ritual. And purpose here is two fold-the purpose of the writer and the purpose of the reader. We tend to forget that co-operation from a reader is necessary for the completion of any written communication and that such co-operation must be purposeful. Unless a reader has a purpose for reading what we have written, our writing cannot successfully communicate. The reader must hope to get out of reading our communication essentially what we have hoped to put into it or he either will not read or will be frustrated in his reading. A sincere attempt to communicate, then, involves not only having something to say but also having an audience who want to hear what you want to say. An obvious example of failure in communication for this reason is the soapbox orator who has no audience or has an audience with no real desire to listen to what he is trying to say. Selection and rejection of material in any communication are determined by purpose. We do not include materials which tend to defeat our purpose; if we know what we are doing, we do not include materials irrelevant to our purpose; certainly we bend every effort to gather together that material which most effectively does serve our purpose, and our success in finding such material is the measure of worth of the "content" of our communication. When we say of a communication that its content is "thin" or "weak," we mean that the writer has failed to find enough material genuinely relevant to his purpose. The arrangement or organization of the material of a communication must likewise be governed by its purpose. That is why no one formula for organization will work on all occasions. For some purposes a chronological arrangement may be best; for others it would be disastrous. The same is true of the various kinds of logical organization: no one kind will fit all purposes, and some purposes can be served by none of these. In certain kinds of humorous writing, for instance, where amusement is the purpose of both writer and reader, the most illogical arrangement best serves the purpose. Perhaps the aspect of the writing process with the most pitfalls for teacher and student alike is that we may call "expression." Here especially we are likely to think in absolutistic terms-insisting that some forms of expression are always good, others always bad, forgetting that purpose (of both writer and audience) determines these matters too.(When we consider that even in poetry the long battle over so-called "poetic diction" still goes on, with the die-hards insisting that certain expressions have no place in poetry and the experimental poets finding ever new areas of expression which seem to have been debarred from poetry in the past, it is not surprising that there is still confusion at the level of student writing.)Many teachers, perhaps all of us, still mark certain expressions on student papers as "wrong," not because they are inappropriate to the purpose of the communication but simply because we do not like them under any circum- stances. Even the fact that dictionaries label certain expressions as "archaic" or "colloquial" or "vulgar" does not help much, since many teachers tend to rule out any expressions so labeled as being "impure." This in spite of the fact that we all know by now, or should know, that we adapt our diction and expression to purpose and situation constantly. We would not think of using the same forms of expression in, let us say, approaching the dean on a matter of salary or helping a group of students to edit the college paper. Too many teachers still behave as though all student writing should be done in language appropriate for negotiating with deans. The crowning irony is that, having vetoed as "slangy" or "poor diction" most of the forms of expression which come naturally to our students, we complain that the resulting artificial diction and unnatural phrasing are "stilted" or "awkward." It is a good thing the students are even more confused in these matters than we are; otherwise they