Process Writing

Rationale for process writing It’s wrong for teachers to dictate to students what they write. Writing should match students’ needs and interests. Process of writing highly individualistic and writers need to draw upon a variety of techniques which they find useful to themselves.

Focus on process writing Ron White and Valerie Arndt (1991) – Process Writing Process writing is seen as an ‘enabling process’. –“The goal is to nurture the skills with which writers work out their own solutions to the problems they set themselves, with which they shape their raw material into a coherent message, and with which they work towards an acceptable an appropriate form for expressing it.”

Process vs Product What differentiates a process focused approach to writing from a product focused approach is that the outcome of writing is not pre-conceived. Writing in a process focused approach is divergent, with as many different outcomes as there are writers. Process focused lessons may introduce texts written by other people but only after the students have written something of their own, so the text is now a resource for further ideas rather than a model for mimicry.

Possible contradictions? But won’t students just abandon what they’ve written and mimic at this later stage? No pre-conceived ideas? Is this possible? Surely, any initial stimulus, and there has to be something, is pre-conceived, and thus to some extent directs the writing towards some form of pre-conceived product.

Process Writing Model Generating ideas StructuringRe-viewingFocusing Evaluating Drafting

Writing Activities 1.Authentic student writing – students’ own personalised output from the activity / activities employed. 2.Use of minimal input material, which acts as a stimulus for a lesson or series of lessons. Priority is given to the students creating their own texts, rather than having them analyse finished products of other writers. Typical activities usually focus upon:

Process writing activities for the classroom