Process Of Writing, Not Final Product

Since the students that I am working with are all from China, except for one who is from South Korea, students wrote a paper that explored and explained to their readers a cultural artifact from their countries. The students had previously turned in their final drafts to the teacher and now the papers were graded, and so, I thought the teacher was going to do what teachers typically do after students’ papers were graded. She would simply say how well the general papers were and direct the students to look over the written comments that she made. However, this was not the case. Instead, the teacher asked the students to reflect on their process of writing during most of the class session. The teacher was not treating students’ papers as an end result; rather, she was using the papers to build on students’ understanding of writing. Maxine Hairston in her text, The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing, explains how writing instruction that focuses on the final product limits the students understanding of writing because they don’t see the various creative processes involved in writing. Hairston states,“[Students] believe that the composing process is linear, that it proceeds systematically from prewriting to writing to rewriting.” (78). Typically, writing becomes a set formula by focusing on the final products of writing. By focusing solely on the drafts, students are never able to explore and become aware to the process that go on in between the drafts. Writing instruction should be more than a systematical routine because each writer is different. In their article, The Five Paragraph Essay and the Deficit Model of Education, Lil Brannon, Jennifer P. Courtney, Cynthia P. Urbanski, Shana V. Woodward, and Jeanie M. Reynolds state, “Writing…should not be yet another way to train students to be obedient citizens, but rather provide them with opportunities to develop their thinking as individuals, making meaning through the act of composing” (17). Instruction based around the processes of writing teaches students the tools needed to construct their papers in their own ways but in a way that still leads to effective and successful papers. Going back to the teacher who I assist in a writing class, she directed the students’ attention to the processes of writing by focusing on the different aspects of writing that the students had to consider when constructing their papers. The teacher mainly had students think about how they arranged, connected, and described their ideas about their specific cultural artifact. I was sitting next to one of the students and asked him what he was thinking. He explained to me how he should have placed the paragraph about his cultural artifact’s history as the first body paragraph. The student’s cultural artifact was about Chinese paintbrushes that are used when writing Chinese words, or symbols. In his paper, he used his first body paragraph to describe how the Chinese paintbrushes were made and what different materials are used to make the different paintbrushes. However, he realized how the paper could have been improved if he had to placed the history first, which he could have then connected to the paragraph that described the different paintbrushes. This would have given the reader a better understanding of how the Chinese paintbrush evolved over time. If the teacher hadn’t allowed the student to reflect on his process of writing, he could have missed this growth in understanding of arrangement in the writing process. The paper was more than just a grade, which only emphasizes the final product of a written piece of work, but it was a tool to introspect the dynamics of writing. The student was discovering how to effectively employ arrangement in an expository essay, which would produce the strongest impact and understanding on the student’s reader. In Peter Smagorinsky, Larry R. Johannessen, Elizabeth A. Kahn, and Thomas M. McCann’s book, The Dynamics of Writing Instruction, they describe how writing instruction should aim to teach students the processes of writing. They explain, “Instruction allows students to develop composition procedures in relation to particular tasks, such as argumentation, description, narration, extended definition, fable, or any other specific type of writing that relies on particular social and rhetorical conventions” (20). Yes, different types of papers do require different types of procedures, or process, when writing a paper. Since the students wrote an expository essay, they had to arrange their essays in a way that would produce as much clarity for the reader as possible, which, as the quote above mentions, means recognizing the certain “social and rhetorical conventions” in an expository essay. The student, who discussed Chinese paintbrushes, become more aware to these conventions through the teacher’s instruction of reflecting on the convention of arrangement and connection. How could the student have learned to improve his writing ability through a grade on his paper? He couldn’t. A reflection and evaluation on his writing process in his creation of his final paper, however, could and, as witnessed from above, did.