Education Atlas

How Knowledge Is Built
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme
Learning Theory and Concepts

Writing Process

Instructional Design and Curriculum Frameworks

A writing process is the set of mental and physical steps a person works through to produce a piece of text, involving tools that range from pencils and brushes to keyboards and touchscreens, each with its own effect on how a writer works. Because of that variety, writing processes are highly individualized and task specific, often mixing talking, drawing, reading and browsing alongside the writing itself. Pre-writing strategies can include clustering, free writing and asking who, what, when, where, why and how questions to generate material before a draft is composed. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Facts
Partially Attested
Origin Year
1972 1
Year marks Donald Murray's 1972 manifesto that launched the process movement in composition pedagogy, not a single founding date for writing processes in general.
Core Claim
A writing process is a set of mental and physical steps that someone takes to create any type of text. 1
FAQs

Is the writing process really a fixed set of stages?

No. Contemporary composition studies treat the stages as overlapping and repeating rather than a fixed sequence.

Not according to contemporary research. Early process-based teaching, following Donald Murray in 1972, broadly described writing as pre-writing, writing and rewriting. Present-day research still accepts that some kind of process is involved in producing any text, but it holds that no codifiable or generalizable writing process exists. From the perspective of composition studies, an authentic writing process, one not contrived as part of a school assignment, does not necessarily follow a linear sequence of stages. Different activities overlap and can repeat many times while a single document is composed.
Connections

In Approach

Source Writing process (Wikipedia)

Long-Form Articles

Sources
1. Writing process (Wikipedia)
  • Historical and contemporary perspectives
    In 1972, Donald M. Murray published a brief manifesto titled 'Teach Writing as a Process Not Product'
  • Lead section
    A writing process is a set of mental and physical steps that someone takes to create any type of text.
View the Source
Writing process (Wikipedia)
  • Lead section
    A writing process is a set of mental and physical steps that someone takes to create any type of text.
  • Lead paragraph, education-level
    A writing process is a set of mental and physical steps that someone takes to create any type of text.
  • In Approach: Cognitivism, Lead paragraph, in-approach
    A writing process is a set of mental and physical steps that someone takes to create any type of text.
View the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.