A method for teaching writing called the "process approach" is on the increase in many school districts. Supporters of the method are admirably enthusiastic. They have publicized it widely through articles in professional journals and worked diligently to stamp out the use of other methods such as sentence combining which they call "unnatural writing" or "mechanistic."

However, there are signs that the process approach may look better in professional articles than in practice. Recent studies show it is not particularly effective in typical school settings. Reviewing the research lets educators and consumers of education understand what the "process approach" is and why it does not work well with many students.

The growing use of the process approach is reflected by this statement in The Writing Report Card, the report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress on our students' writing skills:

. . . The emphasis in writing instruction moved from the final product to the process -- planning, drafting, revising, and editing. As a result, school districts across the country have begun to institute process-oriented approaches to writing instruction.

But The Writing Report Card is not able to give the process approach a high grade:

Some students did report extensive exposure to process-oriented writing activities, yet the achievement of these students was not consistently higher or lower than the achievement of those who did not receive such instruction. At all three grade levels assessed, students who said their teachers regularly encouraged process-related activities wrote about as well as students who said their teachers did not.

What exactly is this approach that "school districts across the country have begun to institute" without noticeable benefits, certainly not matching those from sentence combining, which has tallied good results but less publicity?Professional writers sometimes think about a piece for a while and rewrite several drafts before submitting it for publication. This process suggested to a group of educators that having students go through a similar "process" would improve their writing skills. The writing process, they say, has four steps which students should follow in learning to write. The assumption is that if students follow these steps -- which represent a rough overview of how good writers sometimes compose and improve a paper -- their skills will improve:

There is one minor theoretical flaw in this four-step model of the writing process: It does not even remotely represent the real-life writing process, either regarding the motivation for writing or the detailed activities of writing. This is not a major flaw. The process approach would still be a great idea if it were a better mousetrap, metaphorically speaking, if it taught students to write. Let's first examine the major flaw -- why it isn't very effective in improving writing skills. Then we'll return to the minor theoretical flaw.

The four-step model is the framework for the process approach described neatly in professional papers and many recent English textbooks. But when you try to apply the approach, you come to the first small problem.

Students are advised to use the first step in starting a paper, but what paper? What should it be about? Which topic should students write on?

The sincere student complaint, "I don't know what to write about," is familiar to all English teachers. The textbook Writing with a Purpose admits to pupils that, "Many student writers complain that their biggest problem is finding a subject." The Instructor's Guide warns teachers that "The advice to 'write from what you know or what you care to learn' is often difficult for students to follow". One procedure it suggests is to "ask students to list all the subjects about which they have some expertise".

As an alternative, students may be given broad writing topics such as these:

In 300 words write about an exciting experience.

In 300 words describe and explain any changes you would like to see in schools.

Try to think of ideas for a paper on one of these topics. Most people find it takes time trying to pin down enough material to write 300 words. Typical responses from students are "I can't think of a really exciting experience that I can write about in school." "I could write about changes . . . Let me think . . . I have to write a whole 300 words? . . . I know some changes, but I don't know if I could write 300 words about them.

Because of such student difficulties, some theorists assert that each student should pick his own topic, one that is personally meaningful to him. A prominent writer in the field, Murray, explains:

The student finds his own subject. It is not the job of the teacher to legislate the student's truth. It is the responsibility of the student to explore his own world with his own language, to discover his own meaning.

Students are told that writing is a "process of discovery." Through writing, they will "discover what they have to say" and "what they really believe" -- they will "construct personal meaning." In Rhetonic and Composition, Kelly explains, "the content of composition is the writer -- the self that is revealed, thoughtfully and feelingly, in our own language, with our own voice". Emig, in a report we will review shortly, maintains that the expression of feelings is a more important form of communication than content-oriented academic writing, and that it should be encouraged more strongly by schools.

However, students are often reticent about exposing deep feelings to outsiders because true desires and reactions may be embarrassing or uninteresting. Teachers assure students that their papers do not have to be amusing or clever, just truthful. But all know that both teachers and students prefer humorous, thrilling, or surprising papers rather than dull, boring, or socially awkward ones, creating extra pressures and problems in picking a topic and generating ideas. To be successful in this social activity before the teacher, and, if papers are read aloud, peers of both gender, the student must be an entertaining writer. Writing With a Purpose reminds students that

. . . readers want writing that tells them something interesting or important, and they are put off by writing that is tedious or trivial. It is this wider audience that you . . . must consider as you work through the writing process.

A student explained his feelings this way: "Finding something to write about is like trying to make conversation with a stranger on an elevator. You want to say something, but you don't know what to say."

Many procedures have been devised to help students think of ideas. Known collectively as invention strategies because they are intended to help invent substance for a paper, they include listing, clustering, freewriting, and journal entries.

Listing consists of writing a topic heading or title at the top of a page and then spending five or ten minutes jotting down every idea that comes to mind on the topic.

In clustering, the topic is written in a circle in the center of a page, and related associations are written as branches stretching out with twigs of details for constructing a nest of ideas. When ideas for one branch are exhausted, the writer returns to the center and begins creating another.

Freewriting is another form of getting onto paper all ideas even remotely related to a topic, without trying to arrange or evaluate them. Freewriting differs from listing by using connected discourse rather than syntactically unconnected phrases and scribbles of thought. But in contrast to standard prose, freewriting is stream of consciousness outside the rhetorical and grammatical harness.

Keeping a journal as an invention strategy asks students to write perhaps 100 words in a notebook on events and ideas occurring during each day. Students are encouraged to do more than just maintain a log of events but to include feelings, reminiscences, associations, and especially ideas, examples, and phrases that might be used in a paper.

Besides these strategies and several others, some teachers have students meet in pairs or small groups to brainstorm for ideas and discuss topics for a paper.

There are two problems with all invention strategies. First, none works well. Finding things to write about remains a difficulty for many students and therefore a hindrance in using the process approach. The desperateness of the situation is seen in this example of the instruction teachers commonly give students to continue writing when nothing more comes to mind (from Integrated Skills Reinforcement):

Timed Writing

If your topic for this paper is education and you don't know where to begin, for ten minutes try writing nonstop everything that comes into your mind when you hear the word education. Keep writing, even if you have to keep stating, "I don't know what to write.

The second problem with invention strategies is that they all take time away from actually learning to write. The more elaborate strategies take more time. While students are trying to think of ideas, they are not learning the writing skills and knowledge (openings, phrase formats, sentence patterns, paragraph transitions) they need in order to express and convey their ideas.

There was a hope that some of the invention strategies would themselves build writing skills. It was suggested that freewriting and keeping a journal would improve writing ability. Unfortunately, the most recent NCTE research survey reports that freewriting and keeping journals have only modest benefits for writing skills. Of all the instruction methods examined, the only one less useful than freewriting is grammar, which is totally worthless:

Free writing asks students to write freely about whatever interests or concerns them. As a major instructional technique, free writing is more effective than teaching grammar in raising the quality of student writing. However, it is less effective than any other focus of instruction examined. Even when examined in conjunction with other features of the "process" approach model of teaching writing (writing for peers, feedback from peers, revision, and so forth), these treatments are only about two-thirds as effective as the average experimental treatment.

The practice of building more complex sentences from simpler ones has been shown to be effective in a large number of experimental studies. This research shows sentence combining, on the average, to be more than twice as effective as free writing as a means of enhancing the quality of student writing.

Freewriting fails, apparently, because when students write for themselves, they are not getting instruction and guidance for improvement. This is the problem plaguing the entire process approach -- lack of models and feedback.

The assumption is sometimes made that since students can speak, they can learn to write just by writing. Oral language, however, differs from standard written English. Here is something a person might say:

last night I had to get the carburetor fixed -- darn car quit running on the way to the movie -- we were right in the middle of traffic on Broadway

Oral language does not have capital letters or periods, and ideas are often strung along rather than connected with subordinators and coordinators. Students can learn various acceptable ways for expressing the same ideas in writing:

Last night I had to get the carburetor fixed. The car quit running on the way to the movie, right in the middle of Broadway traffic.

Last night I had to get the carburetor fixed because on the way to the movie, right in the middle of Broadway traffic, the car quit running.

To get the car running again last night after it stopped in the middle of Broadway traffic on the way to the movie, I had to have the carburetor repaired.

Such sentence patterns and options are learned most efficiently through direct instruction and modeling -- as in sentence combining and text reconstruction -- not through working alone without examples or a coach. The NCTE survey of writing instruction drew this conclusion: "we . . . cannot expect students to teach themselves how to write effectively simply by writing whatever they wish for varied groups of their peers".

Perhaps the biggest problem of invention strategies for most students is that they are needed at all. Finding something to write about is often an artificial problem created by certain forms of writing instruction such as the process approach. In real life, situations give rise to ideas which need to be conveyed, and only then does one decide to write. You don't decide out-of-the-blue to write -- and then have to figure out to whom and about what.

You might receive a mail-order shirt that is the wrong size or color and return it with a letter explaining the error and necessary correction. At a great vacation spot you might write a vivid letter home to friends, so they will come along next year. Letters you write, ranging from invitations letters to business memos, are generally to a particular person for a specific purpose.

The same is true for real-life reports and papers. Whether you write chemistry reports, business reports, history papers, psychology papers, economic essays, or technical reports, you have ideas to convey and you need communication skills.

In the following journal entry note that writer Eric Hoffer says the ideas for his article have "been worked out long ago," so he does not have to sit and think of things to write about:

May 11

The article on man and nature which I am writing for the Saturday Evening Post is coming along fine. Almost every idea in the train of thought has been worked out long ago. What I have to do is dovetail them more or less smoothly.

In classroom applications of the process approach, however, students must first take time inventing a topic before beginning to write and practice skills.

Once students choose a topic, they proceed to the second step in the process approach and face its second flaw. Students are told to write a first draft on a paper. But how? How should it start and what form should it take? Students are not taught language usage, sentence patterns, or models for developing ideas. They are not taught how to write the first draft.

Most skills are learned best through instruction and demonstration by an expert, followed by practice, preferably with frequent feedback and guidance from the expert. If you can afford private lessons to learn golf, the instructor demonstrates step-by-step how to hold the club, aim, swing, and follow-through. Watching golf pros is useful, but having a pro guide you through all the movements is better. The process approach makes no explicit provision for demonstration or guidance in teaching students to write. Shaw, Director of the John S. Knight Writing Program at Cornell, comments:

Teachers interested in the writing process may turn their classes into writing workshops. . . . In at least one influential model, this workshop atmosphere follows from the belief that students already know how to write, that writing is based on innate competence for expression.

Both Achilles'heels of the process approach -- inadequate modeling and paucity of feedback-intrude again in the third step: revising to improve a paper.

How can a student revise a paper without a knowledge base of writing patterns for recasting sentences, expressing ideas, and showing relationships? Studies show that when students are asked to read and improve their own papers, their changes consist primarily of correcting spelling and grammar errors. They seldom reword or combine sentences, rearrange material, or rewrite sections or paragraphs.

The process approach is based on a non sequitur. Because a good writer improves a paper by making revisions, it assumes that if students are told to revise, their skills will improve. A good writer has a collection of experiences and tricks that he or she draws on in improving a paper. A weak writer does not.According to The Writing Report Card, the quality of teacher feedback is a powerful variable in the effectiveness of writing classes. But teacher feedback takes time. Suppose a teacher reads the first drafts from all of his or her students. If there are 120 students and the teachers spends 71/2 minutes reading and writing comments on each paper, this comes to 15 hours -- 15 hours beyond full-time preparation and teaching.Quick feedback (overnight turnover) is best -- which means marking for hours in the evening. Furthermore, studies show that many students hardly glance at comments on papers. They benefit most if comments are not just written on their papers but explained in a oneto-one conference giving detailed guidance or specific assignments for improving particular weaknesses. In reality, this expands beyond feasibility the time required for the feedback needed by many students to improve their writing with the process approach. Optimistically, some teachers do try to schedule short, individual conferences with students. But add to this another fifteen hours for grading the revised, final papers, and the teacher has a work week of over 70 hours. Teachers who really try to teach writing this way are very tired at the end of the school year, and many burn out.In attempting to deal with this, the process approach generally has students meet in pairs or small groups to read aloud or exchange papers, giving and getting suggestions for improvement. The process approach takes the following form when group meetings are included:

Some teachers have reported the successful use of peer discussion for revision. But many find that in their classes it exemplifies the phrase "the blind leading the blind." The same lack of knowledge which prevents students from writing well and revising their own papers prevents them from giving good feedback to others. Also, they tend to be too generous with compliments, not wanting to hurt each other's feelings with criticism.

In her first-semester junior college writing classes, Linden asked students to find one point to praise in each paper and to make one suggestion for improvement. But the students confined their suggestions mainly to correcting mechanical errors, particularly in spelling and capitalization. In their eyes no paper was so thin in content or details that they passed judgment on a classmate to go back and do more writing. They seemed either undisturbed or too kind to note when the organization of a paper was totally chaotic. Over many years of teaching high school and college English, Linden tried peer revision groups with about a dozen classes, but it worked well only once, in an advanced second-semester college class. It never succeeded with typical high school or freshmen college students, leaving Linden herself to evaluate and make comments on first drafts, hold one-to-one conferences, and grade final papers -- the conscientious English teacher's 70hour work week.

A report by Emig entitled The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders casts a revealing light on the entire revision stage of the process model. Emig studied the writing processes of high school students by interviewing them and observing them as they wrote. Several of the students had been identified as strong writers by their teachers and had won writing awards. Emig found that these strong students write good first drafts of papers and then stop, without going back and doing much revising. When asked about revision, they say they usually do not bother revising if their papers are good enough. They regard revising as a tedious punishment for students who make too many errors. Because Emig believes in the four-stage process approach, she recommends that all students should be taught to revise. In the same report, she also asserts that many English teachers are not well-prepared to teach writing. Poor instruction, she says, is "partially attributable to teacher illiteracy. . . . More crucial, many teachers of composition, at least below the college level, themselves do not write." While these are personal opinions, not research findings, Emig helped organize a series of continuing workshops to upgrade English teachers' competence-by teaching them the process approach.

Emig's finding that good students often do not revise pinpoints another troublesome flaw in the four-stage writing approach, namely that the four stages distort through oversimplification the real writing process.

Writing and rewriting are constantly intertwined. They are not separate stages. In writing, you may start to formulate a sentence in one form but before you begin hitting the keyboard, recast it into another form. Already you have revised. Then you type three sentences, read them over, and see how the first and second can be combined. After writing several paragraphs, and again at the end of the page, you may reread and find things to revise. Writers seldom write a first draft without looking back, then shift into stage 2 and reread the entire draft for things to modify, then shift into stage 3 and go straight through making all the modifications.

Quite often, after completing a first draft -- and knowing all the thought and revision that went into it it -- a writer has no intention of doing any more revising. He or she rereads the draft solely because he or she knows from experience there are always spelling and typing errors to correct. Sometimes the writer finds a sentence to recast here, an idea to extend there, and spends two more full days with innumerable minor and major revisions. But other times he or she is lucky, corrects two spelling errors, adds a comma, and is done.

Revising can be hard, time-consuming work. Often a first draft is good enough. A writer may only bother doing substantial revising if there is a particular interest in making a point with some audience. Rereading a paper with a strong interest in its effectiveness -- picturing the reactions, background, and biases of the audience -- one may see ways to improve the presentation of ideas. But students seldom have such a strong motivation for polishing papers in English classes.

Some textbooks spend many paragraphs admonishing students to write for this or that particular audience with diligence and craftsmanship, taking ownership of their papers as important publishable documents. But expecting them to be so strongly motivated by a "pretend" situation that they undertake taxing cognitive labor to revise an already satisfactory written communication is like expecting them to work for a nice present from Santa Claus.

That a separate revision stage is not an indispensable part of all good writing is seen again in these observations from the New York Times Book Review of a novel team-written by students in Ken Kesey's creative writing class:

Since "Caverns" aims to be both an intriguing tale and a revolutionary model for the teaching of creative writing, it might be worthwhile to explore the ways in which Mr. Kesey's methods work or fail to work. Most successful writers value the advice and suggestions of colleagues and editors, and Mr. Kesey's emphasis on a spirit of friendly collaboration is likely to help beginning writers learn how to accept or reject criticism. The focus, however, of Mr. Kesey's class is clearly on writing, not revision. There is much to be said for his insistence that students required to write for a set period of time and then immediately read their work. Apparently, such a technique does not permit either writer's block or the endless revising of each passage, problems that can easily plague novice writers.

Emig's finding that strong students possess skills which allow them to write a good first draft without a separate revision stage suggests that English classes need a pedagogy for effectively teaching such strong skills to more students in today's schools. Then students can use these skills to revise when they have a reason to.

Familiarizing students with the writing process, namely that experienced writers often take appreciable time getting ideas, that new ideas and insights may occur as they write, and that they often revise and rewrite extensively, can be worthwhile. Students can be encouraged to use these aids in writing original papers after doing text reconstruction exercises described in the next chapter. Also, in advanced content courses -- literature, history, chemistry -- students meeting in groups to discuss first drafts of papers and reports might provide useful feedback in clarifying concepts, relationships, or operations. They might learn to write more clearly, teach each other report formats and course content, and come to appreciate the usefulness of revision.

But making the writing process the main focus for instruction in English classes has not been successful. The process approach highlights steps writers sometimes use to write and polish a paper, although the steps are generally blurred and intermingled. But these steps have not been a faithful guide for improving the skills of students. The steps may roughly represent the writing process, but they do not represent the best learning-to-write process. They are perhaps steps for writing a paper -- but not for teaching writing ability. The NCTE survey of writing instruction concludes:

The research on the composing process provides little evidence to suggest that free writing as a main focus in the natural process mode of instruction will be effective. While Graves and his colleagues argue in favor of letting children choose their own topics, write what they want, submit it to peer review, and then revise, some of the actual evidence presented is negative, and some suggests that their subjects' writing is not so free as it might be.

Elsewhere, Graves observes:

Teachers of English should, of course, help their young charges with problems of conceptualization and discovery, but they cannot stop there. They must go on to a task which is not as glamorous yet just as important, for those beginners must learn how to become consummate craftsmen of the language.

Graves mentions three concern of English teachers -- discovery, conceptualization, and craftsmanship. Discovery can be left as the last priority: People generally write because they have information they want to convey -- facts, explanations, complaints, instructions, compliments. They don't need to "discover" a subject to write about. They need conceptualization skills -- the ability to verbalize and organize their ideas -- and craftsmanship.