Writing My Writing

Writing My Writing

This week’s reading assignment for our 6300 Understanding Writing as a Process course was comprised of sections from the book Bad Ideas About Writing by Cheryl E. Ball and Drew M. Loewe.  We were to read the Introduction and Chapter 2 titled “Bad Ideas About Who Good Writers Are” of the publication.  I focused on “The More Writing Process, the Better” by Jimmy Butts from Chapter 2.  His argument on writing as a process is in direct contrast to what has been discussed in class so far this term.

Butts claims a writing process model consisting of “…pre-writing, drafting editing, revising…publishing…” has been valued to the degree that focusing on a finished product has been devalued: “It was a valuing of the human as a writer, but it began—I suspect—to devalue the written work (Ball and Loewe 109-110).”  As more of Butts’ position relative to process vs product is exposed, his frustration becomes evident. “For better and worse, we value getting things done. Doing stuff. Making stuff. With words, in our particular case. When we make written work, we fall in line with other productive professions: farmers, smiths, tailors, cobblers, artisans. Writing was analogous to building for the Romans. In this view, writing is construction, but thinking about writing is never arriving at what we might create. Our trade is sentences—complete ones generally. Perhaps we fear finishing drafts because we’re afraid they will fail. We writers might nail Nike’s maxim to our walls: Just do it (Ball and Loewe 113).”  Frustration is named in the book’s introduction as a foundation for the project of publicizing the effort to name bad ideas and suggest better ones: “The project has its genesis in frustration… (Ball and Loewe 2).”  I view Butts’ contribution to Bad Ideas in the light of his own anxiety over writers’ unfinished works.  We have focused on aiming at completion in our class discussions of understanding writing as a process.  We have not adopted the notion of revising to the point of never finishing a work.

While I understand Butts’ stance about delay in getting the writing published, his own words testify against him by demonstrating how process is fundamental to completing a work.  He wrote: “Everyone has a writing process…We often do various steps of the writing process while we write, of course – just not necessarily in the prescriptive order outlined in this archaic structure (Ball and Loewe 109).”  As much as Butts decries “writing as a process, not a product” in his argument, I’m reminded of a statement I favor from the article titled “Responding to Student Writing” by Nancy Sommers.  “The problem here is a confusion of process and product; what one has to say about the process is different from what one has to say about the product (Sommers 154).”  Unlike Butts, I say there’s room at the top for both process and product.  I perceive that understanding the writing process greatly impacts completion of quality work.

Butts’ argument speaks to a “process formula” being a false construction in writing a perfect draft.  Yet he presents concepts and findings that challenge his own viewpoint of a process formula being represented.  Again, his own words:  The Council of Writing Program Administrators, an organization that thinks about how writing works especially on college campuses, claims that one of the primary outcomes in learning to become a writer is to understand writing as a process.  The council states this goal in this way: “Writers use multiple strategies, or composing processes, to conceptualize, develop, and finalize projects.” To their credit, the objective is stated in a loose way to accept multiple approaches to writing and flexibility and recursivity in the processes that we develop as writers (Ball and Loewe 111).”  No one formula has been presented or accepted as the means to an end in our class.  At least I haven’t seen one in place.  It is impressed upon us that each writer has a unique writing process.  I argue that understanding writing as a process is not a formulaic approach to writing nor does it constitute delaying the finished product.

Ball, Cheryl E., and Drew M. Loewe, Bad Ideas About Writing, West Virginia U, 2017. Web. 07 Oct. 2018.  <https://textbooks.lib.wvu.edu/badideas/badideasaboutwriting-book.pdf>.

Sommers, Nancy. “Responding to Student Writing.” College Composition and Communication 31.2 (1982): 148-156. Print.