The End of Composition Studies

3. How We Compoe

63 3 HowWeCompose VARIOUS SCHOLARS IN COMPOSITION studies have argued that the one great contribution of the field to our understanding of writing instruction has been the promotion of the “process approach” (see Crowley, Composition – for an overview). After all, the value of the process approach , which began in the late s and early s, seems to have been confirmed by the major research on composing and cognitive processes done in the s: as a pedagogy it provides concrete concepts such as invention and revision techniques for instructors to teach; it provides models to guide instructors in providing feedback and advice to their students (working through drafts, concentrating on only a few major concepts at a time, saving editing until the end); and above all, it is based on what we in the field know about how writing is done. The process approach“feels right”: it seems to confirm our intuitive sense of how we actually write. Of course, much of the discussion and application of the “process approach ” seems to imply a fairly straightforward linear model of composing —invention, planning, drafting, revising, editing—and we can all cite exceptions to this model in our own experience and in the published accounts of professional writers. There are times when writers do not use invention techniques; they seem to respond“spontaneously”to the demands of a particular piece of writing. There are times when writers do not revise; the first draft seems to be entirely appropriate and need no further tinkering . There are writers who edit as they go and do no major editing when they are at the end of a series of drafts. And of course, if we become reflective, we must admit that the model implied by the process approach has difficulty accounting for such two widely different composing processes as these: 64 Conceptual Limits One evening in the middle of April I had an experience which seems worth describing for those who are interested in the methods of poetic production. It was a sultry spring night. I was feeling dull minded and depressed, for no assignable reason. After sitting lethargically in the ground floor room for about three hours after dinner, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing for it but to take my useless brain to bed. On my way from the arm-chair to the door I stood by the writing table. A few words had floated into my head as though from nowhere. . . . I picked up a pencil and wrote the words on a sheet of notepaper. Without sitting down, I added a second line. It was as if I were remembering rather than thinking. In this mindless, recollecting manner I wrote down my poem in a few minutes. When it was finished I read it through, with no sense of elation, merely wondering how I had come to be writing a poem when feeling so stupid. I then went heavily upstairs and fell asleep without thinking about it again. . . . The poem was Everyone Sang, which has since become a stock anthology piece. (Siegfried Sassoon, qtd. in Britton, “Composing” ) As he writes, Bill engages in numerous revising tactics. He writes a sentence, stops to examine it by switching it around, going back to add clauses, or combining it with other text on the same page or a different sheet of paper. For the assigned writing task, he began with one sheet of paper, moved to another, tore off some of it and discarded it, and added part back to a previous sheet. At home when writing a longer paper, he will similarly engage in extensive cutting and pasting. (Muriel Harris ) What do these two acts of composing have in common? It depends on what we mean. At a very abstract level, we might say that both acts of composing illustrate a person getting an idea for something to write and implementing that idea with appropriate syntax, organization, detail, and a tone relative to his purpose, audience, and context. In another sense, of course, the two acts of composing have very little in common at all. For Siegfried Sassoon, the idea for the poem seemed to come to him out of the blue, and he found the words, the order, the detail, the tone quite fluently, almost as if the poem had been merely dictated by some inner voice (for an example of a person composing academic prose with the same fluency, see MacNealy, Speck, and Simpson). Sassoon’s experience is evidence for...