Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the 90s

Until the late 1960s, English departments were almost exclusively literature departments. The teaching of writing was seen only as an apprenticeship for graduate students and part-timers who hoped to move on soon to more gratifying work, and most students' writing process consisted of "procrastinate, write, hand in, hope for the best."

Taking Stock examines how all of this changed. Advocates of the writing process movement offered a new vision of composition teaching and research. More than twenty-five years after the appearance of their radically new ideas, Taking Stock reassesses the ways that the writing process has been taught, institutionalized, researched, and theorized. A collection of articles drawn from the University of New Hampshire's historic 1992 conference on the writing process movement, Taking Stock presents some of the major figures -- such as Britton, Elbow, Macrorie, Moffett, and Murray -- who reflect on their early contributions in light of developments.

Other contributors offer new answers to persistent questions and new ones -- about gender and authority in process classrooms; about why authors, teachers, and scholars use such different language when they talk about the writing process; about the search for the self in an age of post modernism.

Lad Tobin is an assistant professor of English at Boston College where he directs the first-year Writing Program, trains graduate assistants, and teaches composition and composition theory. He is author of Writing Relationships: What Really Happens in the Composition Class (Boynton/Cook, 1991) and Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the '90s (Boynton/Cook, 1994). His articles on the nature of interpersonal relationships in the writing class have appeared in College English, College Composition and Communication, To Compose (Heinemann, 1989), and Vital Signs 2 (Heinemann, 1991). Thomas Newkirk is the author of numerous Heinemann titles, including Minds Made for Stories, The Art of Slow Reading, The Performance of Self in Student Writing (winner of the NCTE's David H. Russell Award), and Misreading Masculinity. For almost three decades, Tom taught writing at the University of New Hampshire where he founded the New Hampshire Literacy Institutes, a summer program for teachers. In addition to working as a teacher, writer, and editor, he has served as the chair of his local school board.