Social Class Reproduction

Four Rules for Teaching Writing:
Image result for image: joy of writing
Always give writing assignments that

1. you will enjoy reading;
2. students will enjoy writing;
3. students will enjoy reading what others in the class have written
4. you will enjoy writing.

If any one of these conditions were not true, then it probably wasn't a very good assignment.

Advice I give to my students: When your words surprise you, you know you are writing.

Saturday, October 10, 2015

Post-Process Writing

I will try to  make this post uncharacteristically quick because I'm tying to write out a thought that I am using in another essay. I referred to the question about revision and the aligned project of teaching writing as process in a post below.

I'm somewhat surprised by myself. When John Trimbur announced the post-process movement in 1994, I remember I thought, well--here we are: we have to announce ourselves by announcing the death of our father, another turn in the never-ending series of "turns" in our field.

And now here I am in 2015, post-processing. My logic is not Trimbur's. But nevertheless, as I have written below, I back-pedal on invention and revision. I know in my own writing the value of invention and revision (in fact, I am inventing here for writing I am doing elsewhere), but I like to have my students write and write and write (with invention and revision here and there).

My logic  is simple: I know students get bored by process, spending far too long on an "essay." I think there might be more value in having the students more frequently combine invention/writing, they are inventing (as I am doing here) as they go along. And maybe revise a little--like look back before you post, change some things here and there, but don't overly restrict the flow of writing, of writing as a conversation.  I think my students get more out of inventing/writing a lot than being mired in the process of writing. I can imagine a metaphor for how we live.

2 comments:

  1. Irv,

    The post-process turn is a myth--as is the process turn--at least as both are commonly misunderstood. While some may have understood process as a sequence of distinct steps, none of the major process theorists ever really described process pedagogy so simply. In fact, what you describe as post-process is in many important ways identical to process pedagogy.

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