"Perspectives on the Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum: A Dialogue Between the Sciences and Humanities"

Writing as a Process

While the final written product created by student writers will differ between disciplines, research in the field of composition and rhetoric indicates that the process of writing is similar despite the audience or expectations of the discipline.  However, the process of writing itself is a complex activity, as students must learn certain requirements when writing, as well as the expectations for each genre of writing students will encounter within one course and across the disciplines. 

In order to understand how the Writing Center is able to help with the writing process, examining what constitutes the process itself is essential.  A notion in composition discourse and articulated by Donald M. Murray, in his article “Teaching Writing as a Process Not Product,” explains that writing should be taught as a step-by-step process.  Murray divides the process into three separate steps:  prewriting, writing, and rewriting (4).  Murray further splits each section by the rough percentage of time it takes to complete the overall process.  Murray defines prewriting as “everything that takes place before the first draft,” writing as “the act of producing a first draft,” and rewriting as the “reconsideration of the subject, form, and audience.  It is researching, rethinking, redesigning, rewriting—and finally, line-by-line editing, the demanding, satisfying process of making each word right” (4).  Murray posits that a large portion of the overall writing process is spent on what he defines as rewriting.  Depending on the course in which a student is enrolled, writing, prewriting, and rewriting may be done in the classroom itself if the course focuses on the act of writing, such as an English 101 course; or on the student’s own time if the course does not focus on classroom writing, such as an upper level offering in any given discipline.  If students are given the opportunity for peer review during class time, each is able to engage in the rewriting portion of the process with guidance; however, all three aspects of the writing process often occur outside the classroom and on the students’ own time.

Another problem for student writers comes during the rewriting and revising scenario when students have often only been taught to make singular line or word choice changes.  In a study comparing experienced and novice writers, Nancy Sommers found that students are not unwilling to revise, but rather that students have only been taught how to do revisions that are narrow in scope (48).  Students are sometimes not capable of fixing content issues or clarifying points in their papers because they have often only been taught or encouraged to change words to “make it sound better.”  As Murray points out, editing is more than just line-by-line editing, and such editing is listed last in Murray’s definition of rewriting.  Yet, as Sommers points out, students who are new to the college writing experience have often only been taught how to line edit, and to be asked to do more than this often leaves them asking Peer Consultants and instructors things such as, “what words do I need to change to get a better grade?” Questions such as these show the tendency of the student to focus on the product rather than the process of writing. 

The question of what to focus on—process or product—becomes further complicated when looked at from the Writing Center perspective.  Writing Centers typically deal primarily with the process of writing, but the final written product is what ultimately gets evaluated and given a grade.  The product is also what most student writers focus on, as it produces the most anxiety; it is the grade, after all, that seems to reflect on a student’s ability to write well.  Although Peer Consultants in the Writing Center are instructed not to pass judgment on the quality of student writing, as they are not the one assigning the grade, the student writer is often focused on the outcome of the process in order to secure a desired grade, and during consultations, students often insist that consultants focus on product-oriented concerns.  Such a dichotomy must be addressed by individual consultants and Writing Centers in order to come to an agreed-upon focus in terms of process versus product.