In his 1972 book The Authentic Voice: A Pre-Writing Approach to Student Writing, for example, Donald Stewart (following Robert Zoellner, and Gordon Rohman and Albert Wlecke) had blamed contemporary teachers for using methods that “teach students how to judge their finished work but not how to produce it”—a development which, Stewart went on to say, “implies a fundamental shift in attention away from the product of writing toward the process by which that product eventually gets on paper” (19). Along with Macrorie, William Coles, Donald Murray, and Peter Elbow, Stewart argued that student writing would improve if students could be given the opportunity and the space to exercise their writing abilities extensively, especially in the earliest stages of the writing process. Accordingly, what were known as “pre-writing techniques” and other process-oriented strategies (e.g., free writing, reflective writing, journal keeping), essential expressivist pedagogies designed to promote student growth through writing, were promoted for the composition classroom to achieve the expressivist aims of personal growth, authenticity, self-discovery, and voice:
The primary goal of any writing course is self-discovery for the student and [. . .] the most visible indication of that self-discovery is the appearance, in the student’s writing, of an authentic voice. It proceeds from the second conviction that the techniques of pre-writing, developed in the 1960s, will best help the student develop this authentic voice. (Stewart, Preface xii)
While expressivists agreed about the importance of the writing process, they committed themselves to somewhat different specific approaches. Coles, an iconoclastic product of Theodore Baird’s writer-centered pedagogies at Amherst (see Varnum) who had become the composition director at Pittsburgh (where he influenced David Bartholomae, who arrived about the same time), was teaching students to develop an effective, individual style that would emerge if they would write frequently about their personal viewpoints and experiences, discuss their writing with others, and use the responses of others (rather than formal rules) to guide their revisions. In The Plural I (1978), Coles in the vein of Macrorie denounced “themewriting” as the inevitable result of most current composition pedagogy and encouraged students to become adept at more expressive than formulaic communications. Elbow in a similar vein was contending that people learn to write not from textbooks but from actually writing and reflecting on that writing; his Writing without Teachers (1973) provided prompts that encouraged a variety of activities, from freewriting to reflection to exchange. While he was careful to emphasize that his approach was designed ultimately to produce better written products, Elbow was widely appreciated for encouraging writers to explore freely their developing thoughts through multiple drafts. And he was adamant about the need to deflect critical attention away from formal matters, including correctness, until very late in the composing process. But Elbow’s approach was not asocial: while he emphasized the need for students to develop personal identities through writing, he also encouraged them to consider audiences for their documents and to learn how to function in communities through discourse. In an appendix to Writing without Teachers, Elbow offered “The Doubting Game and the Believing Game” as a dialectical process of measuring the claims of the self against those of the community.
As the title Writing without Teachers implies, expressivists fundamentally held that formal instruction was more or less incidental to a writer’s growth. Students were regarded as independent agents—even teachers and textbooks were irrelevant—who could intuit principles of effective writing through trial and error. The material of writing came from the student’s own subjective background, the teacher could “never quarrel with the student’s experience” (Elbow 106), and a writing course was thus a matter of a teacher’s nurturing student self-discovery and self-expression. All of these values were already guiding the pedagogy of Donald Murray, who would nurture expressivism into the 1980s: in 1977 Murray was developing an expressivist-process synthesis that was beholden to creative writing workshops and that would find its most mature expression first in his 1978 publication “Write Before Writing” and then in his 1980 “Writing As Process: How Writing Finds Its Own Meaning.” All of these values were also getting theoretical sanction from the instructive sections on expressive discourse in James Kinneavy’s A Theory of Discourse (1971) and from James Britton’s appreciation of expressive discourse in Language and Learning (1970) and The Development of Writing Abilities (1975; the American paperback edition appeared first in 1977).
In their concern for self-discovery rather than communicative effectiveness, however, expressivists clashed with those in the new cognitivist school, which by 1970 was beginning to compete with the expressivist school as the dominant process approach to composition. After all, Janet Emig in her 1971 book The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders had drawn attention not only to the composing processes of writers but also to the mental processes that writers employ while composing. A fierce critic of current-traditional approaches (Crowley, Composition 200–01), Emig also established that professional writers as well as students relied on identifiable mental devices and activities that stimulated composition. By the mid-1970s Linda Flower and John R. Hayes at Carnegie Mellon University were studying through a distinctly cognitive lens the composing processes employed by actual writers, students as well as professionals, in an effort to understand empirically the processes involved in composing. Hayes, a psychologist, teamed with Flower to learn more about how the mind tackles the problem of writing. In December of 1977 Flower and Hayes published in College English their groundbreaking essay “Problem-Solving Strategies and the Writing Process,” a manifesto to their approach to process. They rejected the view of writing as the observance of fixed rules and models and instead called for a more strategic, cognitive “problem-solving” approach: since writing consisted, they felt, of a “hierarchical set of subproblems” tackled iteratively, such as planning and organizing, they offered a set of heuristics to “give the writer self-conscious access to some of the thinking techniques” that good writers use to “generate ideas in language and [. . .] construct those ideas into a written structure” suitable for a specific situation (449, 451). And they were embarking on a research program that would soon generate a series of essays, a 1978 conference, and a set of essays based on that conference, Cognitive Processes in Writing, edited by their Carnegie Mellon colleagues Lee Gregg and Erwin Steinberg in 1980. Research by Flower and Hayes was already contributing to pedagogy by broadening instructors’ conceptions of the writing process and by enabling instructors to develop “strategies for helping student writers to discover their intentions,” including prewriting and inventional strategies, planning and organizational strategies, editing strategies, and so on (Faigley, Fragments 30)—all of which were quickly added to pedagogical efforts throughout the nation. Moreover, Flower and Hayes encouraged teachers to understand the writing process as a set of layered cognitive activities involving not just broad activities like “pre-writing” or “revising” but also specific activities practiced by good writers, such as “setting up goals,” “finding operators,” and “testing your writing against your own editor” (“Problem-Solving” 457–58); in each case Flower and Hayes articulated not only how these strategies worked cognitively but also where they fit into the larger process of writing. Flower and Hayes were not embraced universally or uncritically (Ann Berthoff, from a position in aesthetics and philosophy, was already especially withering in dismissing what she regarded as the cognitivists’ compartmentalization of mental processes); but by 1977 most composition handbooks had come to acknowledge, at least superficially and at most substantially, that writing was a process whose stages ought to be considered in some way by writing teachers—though, as Flower and Hayes pointed out, advocates of process pedagogy tended to take “different roads to the same territory.”16 Most newer textbooks incorporated chapters on invention techniques such as brainstorming and freewriting (products of the expressivists’ approach), describing these strategies and providing exercises to guide students through them; and most offered detailed advice about revision as well.
On a final note, as Janice Lauer indicates in her sidebar, one of the key influences on the movement toward process—the reemergence of interest in rhetoric, especially classical rhetoric and rhetorical invention (a development that we discuss later in this chapter)—matured in the second half of the 1960s. Partly because of James Berlin’s categorizing of the expressive and cognitive schools, this influence has been insufficiently acknowledged in accounts of process pedagogies, but the new rhetorical
