The following excerpt is reprinted from Writing: Teachers and Children at Work by Donald H. Graves. Copyright ©1983 by Donald H. Graves. Published by Heinemann, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc., Portsmouth, NH. (Pages 219 - 229.)
Alison reread her first sentence. She frowned and bit into the soft wood of her pencil; a tear formed in the corner of her eye. Glaring at the paper she muttered, "Stupid," and rumpled her paper into a ball. Alison was in sixth grade and wanted to write about the death of her dog, Muffin. The first line didn't do justice to her feelings.
Each day Alison writes in class. Today is Wednesday, and since Monday she has known she would write about the death of her dog. Since then, a series of images and impressions have rehearsed their way to the surface for inclusion in her story about Muffin. Last year she would have poured a torrent of words and sentences onto the page. This year she is a dissatisfied writer. She is paralyzed by her range of options as well as the apparent inability of her initial words to meet her personal expectations.
What Alison doesn't know is that what reaches the page is the end result of a long line of reductions from an original swirl of memories about her dog. This figure shows the progression of Alison's reductions to the words that finally reach the page:
Since Monday, Alison has been rehearsing a host of images and memories. But when she writes, she can only choose one to work on at a time. Alison chooses the image of Muffin on the bed next to her. Since Alison's communication will use words, she now converts her image to words. The words swirl in telegraphic form and in no particular order. Her final act is to put the words in an order that others will understand: "I felt him on the bed next to me." Compared with the range of images and words Alison has entertained in the process of writing, the sentence is but a ghost of her impressions. A year ago Alison would have assumed the missing material was represented in the sentence. Not now. She knows the words are inadequate. Worse, she does not see any promise in them for reworking. Alison is stalled.
Alison's frustration could be that of a seven-year-old, a doctoral student, or a professional writer. All go through the same process of reduction. The only difference between the amateur and the professional is that the professional is less surprised. Writers who compose regularly have stronger links between the part (sentence) and the whole (the overall story or article) and expect that first attempts will probably represent poor choices. They rewrite for focus, to make better choices, and to rework other images, until words match that inner "yes" feeling. Then they write to add what is naturally subtracted through the very process of writing itself.
What teacher hasn't heard these words: "I'm stuck. This is dumb. It's no use. Now what do I do?" Essentially these writers are asking, "Where am I?" They feel the lack in their words, which have been reduced from richer images and intentions. They don't know where the sentence before them fits in with their original, overall story. Fear even blurs the images and words that once seemed so real in rehearsal.
Teachers can answer children's questions only if they know the writing process from both the inside and the outside. They know it from the inside because they work at their own writing; they know it from the outside because they are acquainted with research that shows what happens when people write.
This chapter will portray what is involved in the writing process. The same process ingredients will be mirrored in three very different writers: my own writing as an adult, Mary, first grade, and John, fourth grade. Process ingredients will be shown from the choice of topic and rehearsal through the first composing and text revisions. Finally, voice, the force underlying all process components, will be considered.
One problem. Don't be fooled by the order in which I describe the writing process. I have to use words, which follow each other in systematic and conventional fashion, for you to understand what I am about. This suggests that thoughts follow in systematic order for everyone. Not so. When a person writes, so many components go into action simultaneously that words fail to portray the real picture. For example, in showing Alison's thought reduction, it is impossible to portray simultaneously speed, or the flow of images, with a working of body memory systems. Alison's reduction may have been entirely unconscious, occurring in from a thousandth of a second to two seconds. Though the order is unpredictable, what is involved in the writing process can be described with profit.
The writing process has many beginning points. It can begin as unconscious "rehearsal." A person observes a child at play, sees two dogs fighting, or recalls a humiliating moment in college while reading a daughter's paper. The more a writer writes, the more choice and rehearsal increase and occur at unpredictable moments. Facts restlessly push their way to the surface until the writer says, "I'll write about that."
A number of years ago some friends and I were swapping yarns about great teachers we had known who had little formal education. I told some anecdotes about my Great Uncle, Horatio Nelson Wilbur, a dry New England wit filled with salty wisdom. The roll of the stories on my tongue and the reactions of my friends to his humor gave rise to the words, "I really ought to write something about him." For two years I made notes and talked with other relatives, until I finally put words to paper. In contrast, six-year-old Mary goes to her writing center, picks up a piece of paper and murmurs, "Let's see, what'll I write about? I know...a wedding." She mumbles again, "The wedding, the beautiful wedding," and reaches for a crayon to draw a bride with veil, tiara, and flowing gown at the top of her twelve-by-eighteen-inch paper.
Conscious rehearsal accompanies the decision to write. Rehearsal refers to the preparation for composing and can take the form of daydreaming, sketching, doodling, making lists of words, outlining, reading, conversing, or even writing lines as a foil to further rehearsal. The writer ponders, "What shall I include? What's a good way to start? Should it be a poem, debate, first person narrative, or short story?"
Rehearsal may also take the form of ego boosting. "This will be magnificent. Surely it will be published. My girl will think I am super. I'll work every day on this. The kids will like it and laugh."
Mary:
Mary rehearses for writing by drawing. As she draws, she recreates visually the impressions that were there at the wedding: colors, dresses, hair styles, the actual persons in the wedding party. She adds jewelry on top of the costumes. "This is what I'm going to have when I get married," she announces to Jennifer writing at the desk next to her, "lots of gold and diamonds." If Mary is asked before she draws what she will write about, her response is general, "I don't know, something about a wedding." If asked the same question farther along in her drawing, her response is more detailed.
John:
John is nine and wants to write about racing cars. Last night he and his father tracked their favorite cars and drivers at the raceway. John can still feel the vibration of the engines as they roared into the curve where he was sitting. Dust, popcorn, the bright lights overhead, the smell of exhaust and gasoline are all part of his unconscious memory. John is so sure of their reality he thinks he merely has to pick up a pencil and the words will pour forth. Without rehearsing, John pauses a moment, and with mouth slightly moving writes:
The cars was going fast.
He rereads the words. "Agggh," he bellows. "This is stupid." No images come to mind from his simple sentence. There are no details to build on. John's reading abilities are strong enough to let him know the sentence says little. He doesn't know what to do with his words. John thinks, reads, but doesn't go on. He can't...alone. He has not yet written regularly enough to learn how to retrieve images and information from previous events.
Don:
Uncle Nelson had been dead for fifteen years. I had missed him, his sense of humor, his slant on life. The laughter of the teachers as I shared one anecdote about him after another made me miss him more. I didn't write anything then but I quickly made a list of every incident and anecdote I could recall from our relationship and from stories others told about him. My rehearsal has grown now for the last two years into several long lists, even some early writing of one incident which I worked on last year. There was a gap of one year between the time I first told stories about Uncle Nelson, made the lists, and began some quick sketching.
Choice and Rehearsal:
Mary, John, and I were hardly aware of making a choice about a writing topic. Topics pushed their way to the surface until each of us said, "I'll write about that." For writers who compose daily, other topics come to them in the midst of writing about another subject, especially if they know they can exercise control over their choices. If a child has to wait for teacher assigned topics, rehearsal is not useful. It is not unusual to hear children speculate about topics they will choose from the future topics already listed in their writing folders. The very act of writing itself, through heightening meaning and perception, prepares us both consciously and unconsciously to see more possibilities for writing subjects. Writing that occurs only once every two weeks limits the ability to make choices because it limits both the practice of writing and the exercise of topic selection. Rehearsal cannot occur since the writer usually doesn't know he will write that day. Under these circumstances, teachers have to come up with topics for the children, which rules out both choice and rehearsal.
Composing refers to everything a writer does from the time first words are put on paper until all drafts are completed. Sometimes when a writer must rehearse by writing, there is overlap between the two, composing and rehearsing.
Don:
About a year after telling my "Uncle Nelson" stories I began to compose. Where to start? I decided to describe my uncle. Two images dominated by thought; one of my Uncle standing in the stern of a skiff, sculling his way into a brisk southwest wind; the other, catching him out of the corner of my eye. That's just the way the image entered my thinking, off to the side, creeping in from the left as I walked head down, picking my way through pools and rocks at low tide. I tried some lines:
At the cry of a gull I looked up and was more attracted by a brown blur bobbing off to my left and not quite behind me. It was the familiar brown felt hat of my Uncle Horatio Nelson Wilbur.
I like to the idea of bringing my Uncle into focus from a blur on my left. But the image just didn't fit with how I felt about him. I wanted a clear, distinct profile. It may be that my work in photography was bothered by the clutter of the beach, the rocks and seaweed. I decided to work with another image. I wrote again:
The brown felt hat was his hallmark. You'd start at that hat a quarter of a mile out to sea, catch a trail of cigar smoke from underneath, and check his usual lean into the wind as his long arm commanded the skull oar in the stern. Casually sure. That was Uncle Nelson.
That felt better. A profile, with some quick sketches to show the person and just a hint of the teacher, was what I wanted. More work was needed, but at least I had my foot in the door.
I didn't publish my first piece of writing until seven years ago, when I was forty-three. Since that time I have tried to write daily, biting my fingernails when I miss a day because it is so hard to pick up a cold trail on an article. Gradually, I have come to trust that if I stay at the writing, something will come of it. Time is my greatest ally. I try to listen to my information to find out which way it will lead me, but ultimately I back off because I am surprised when there is more than I can report. I haven't yet gotten over my years on academic probation in college when I heard, time after time, "Graves, you just don't have enough information. Did you forget again?" Now I'm supposed to throw off that heritage and exclude information.
Then there are days when nothing works. I write a line. It doesn't fit. I try another line. A dead end. I clean my study, make phone calls, eat, return and write some more. I don't know what I'm doing, but the fingers still work on the keys. I wonder when the great breakthrough will come. Will it be just around the corner as it was on Monday, or a month from now as it was last spring? I come to the typewriter every day, some days knowing the writing will go well, other days playing the keyboard as a lottery; never missing a day, but always hoping.
Mary:
Mary finished her drawing, paused, glanced at the wedding party in stick figures and costumes, and spoke softly to herself, "When." She scrawled "Wn" on the line below the drawing, spoke "when" again to confirm what she had done and to establish where she was in the writing, and added "we." "Wn we..." As Mary writes she feels the words with her tongue, confirming what the tongue knows with her ear, eye, and hand. Ever since she was an infant, eye and hand have been working together with the mouth, confirming even further what they don't know.
Mary composes so slowly that she must return to the beginning of her sentence each time and reread up to the current word. Each new word is such a struggle that the overall syntax is obliterated. The present is added to a shaky, indistinct past. The future hardly exists. Beyond one or two words after the word under formulation, Mary cannot share what will happen in her story about the wedding.
Mary may borrow from her internal imagery of the wedding event when she writes, but she frequently uses her drawing as an idea bank. Mary does not appear to wrestle with word choice. Rather, she wrestles with the mechanics of formation, with spelling and handwriting, and then with her reading. She wants the spelling to be stable enough so that when she tries to share it later with her teacher, she will be able to read it.
After writing one sentence, "Wn we wt to the wdg we hd fn," (When we went to the wedding we had fun), Mary's composing has ended. In Mary's estimation the drawing is still the more important part of the paper. This is not surprising since her drawing contains far more information than the writing. Other children will also respond more to her drawing than to her writing.
John:
John impatiently taps the eraser part of his pencil on the desk and glares at his paper, empty save for the one line, "The cars was going fast."
"What's the matter, John?" inquires his teacher, Mr. Govoni.
"I can't write. I don't know what to do. All I have is this."
"Turn your paper over for a minute, John. Now tell me, how did you happen to write about cars?"
"Well, you see last night, me and my Dad, we went to the Raceway out on Route 125. We go there every Saturday night and you should see those guys drive. Charley Jones is the hottest thing right now. You should see him sneak up on a guy, fake to the outside, and just when a guy looks in the mirror at the fake, Charley takes 'em on the inside. Nothin' but dust for the other guy to look at. Charley makes top money."
"Slow down a minute, John. You've said enough already. You know a lot about Charley Jones. Put it down right here and I'll be back in five minutes to see how you are doing."
John begins to write: "Charlie Jones makes a lotta money. He's the best driver around. He has won two weeks in a row. Me and my Dad we saw him drive and he's our favrit." John rushes the words onto the paper, hardly pausing between sentences. A look of satisfaction is on his face. Triumph. At least Charley Jones is in print. John doesn't give the details about Charley passing the other driver. Even though this is good information, John picks up on his last statement. For John, the oral has been the needed rehearsal, a means of hearing his voice and intention. He orally selects, composes, and with a quick rereading, notes that the writing is satisfying since he has been able to include Charley Jones in his draft.
All writers follow a simple pattern: select, compose, read, select, compose, read.... Both Mary and I had to select one bit of information from a mass of information in order to start writing. I first selected the image of my Uncle standing in the stern of his skiff from a mass of memories about him. I converted the choice to words, reducing the full image of him to a quick sketch. I knew I had to write through several starts before I could see in the writing what would be the best selection. Until I could see the words about my Uncle on the page, and had something to read, I couldn't come up with the appropriate line for the writing.
I don't have to worry about handwriting and spelling during the composing process. I type, read, and concentrate totally on the message that emerges on the typewriter before me. I see the sentence that emerges in relation to the total image I want to create of my Uncle in this first scene showing him at sea. The last words in the vignette, casually sure, released a whole series of new incidents and images that needed to be organized or sequenced into the opening lines:
The brown felt hat was his hallmark. You'd start at that hat a quarter of a mile out to sea, catch a trail of cigar smoke from underneath the brim, note the casual lean into the wind as his long arm commanded the scull oar in the stern. Casually sure...that was Uncle Nelson.
Two incidents, one with me, another with some neighbors, would illustrate just how casually sure he was when he taught his lessons. Each trial, first the one on the beach, then the other with my Uncle at sea, had its own select-compose-read cycle. But the daily work on the typewriter has made this cycle automatic for a large portion of the time. There are instances, however, when the choice of the right word can take as long as five to ten minutes, even need to be abandoned for another day.
Mary:
Mary uses the same cycle in her writing. She selects information, but from her drawing, chooses words to go with her selection (voicing them as she goes), composes (still voicing), reads, selects and composes again. Handwriting, spelling, and reading dominate her conscious process. Letter formation, thinking of what sounds will be right with letters, nearly obliterate her message.
Mary's reading is different from mine. We both read for orientation but Mary reads exclusively to know where one word fits in relation to other words. She rereads from the beginning after every word composed. If she has to struggle with a difficult sound-symbol arrangement in the middle of a word, she may have to reread from the beginning to find anew even what word she is composing. Under these circumstances, revision for Mary means only the adjustment of handwriting, spelling and some grammatical inconsistencies. Mary is not yet adjusting her information.
The writing process has a driving force called voice. Technically, voice is not a process component or step in the journey from choice-rehearsal to final revision. Rather, it underlies every part of the process. To ignore voice is to present the process as a lifeless, mechanical act. Divorcing voice from process is like omitting salt from stew, love from sex, or sun from gardening. Teachers who attend to voice listen to the person in the piece and observe how that person uses process components.
Voice is the imprint of ourselves on our writing. It is that part of the self that pushes the writing ahead, the dynamo in the process. Take the voice away and the writing collapses of its own weight. There is no writing, just words following words. Voiceless writing is addressed "to whom it may concern." The voice shows how I choose information, organize it, select the words, all in relation to what I want to say and how I want to say it. The reader says, "Someone is here. I know that person. I've been there, too." But the writer's voice is in the right register, not pointing to itself but to the material. The voice is the frame of the window through which the information is seen. Readers can't read voiceless writing when no one is there any more than they can have a dialogue with a mannequin.
Listen to a friend speak from another room; quickly you say, "hums Norman." Norman has his way of speaking. Experts can take voice imprints from an oscilloscope and say, "That was Louise speaking on the telephone." The same is true in handwriting or any expressive event...the voice is there. Experts argue over the authenticity of a painting. But they argue over technique, arrangement, subject, all as imprints of the voice. "This is the way Vermeer expresses himself. He'd never do it that way." Vermeer discloses himself, as does every artist in every craft, or it isn't craft.
Six-year-old children start with a good voice and go from complication to complication after that, until late in the game, when they become proficient enough to make writing sound like speech. Voice could come earlier in children's writing if we'd only help them discover subjects of their own and then maintain their voices in writing about them.
Mary writes in a simple, straightforward fashion and her voice accompanies her writing. Her speech supplies many of the missing voice elements as she writes. The unselfconscious Mary lets the words fall where they may. Her drawing also contains many voice elements, many expressions of herself, her feelings, opinions, and ideas. The writing certainly doesn't sound like speech, yet Mary's person is evident everywhere.
From that first experience with writing, Mary will spend the rest of her life finding her voice, losing it, and finding it again. Much of the success of this journey depends on her teachers. Every new experience, subject, writing tool, stage of living from childhood through adolescence, and on through stages of adult life, requires new voices to fit the changing person. We speak of the sound, the voice of writers, the early Hemingway, the late Hemingway. They aren't the same person with the same voice. Voices may be similar but they are not identical.
John doesn't know how to retrieve information, to find himself in relation to his subject. His skill in reading has rubbed out his oral voice, once so dominant in his writing. He has to discover the oral routes again, just as he did in first grade. We often hear children say, "I used to be able to write good in second grade, but now I can't write at all in the fourth grade."
Our data show that when a writer makes a good choice of subject, the voice booms through. When the voice is strong, writing improves as well as all the skills that go to improve writing...often without any formal teaching in the tools. When the person is in the piece, the dynamo hums, energy for writing goes up, and the child enjoys the writing. Teachers should never assign what children choose to do when they find their own voices.
Voice breathes through the entire process: rehearsal, topic choice, selection of information, composing, reading, rewriting. Not only is it the dynamo for the writing, but it contributes most to the development of the writer. It pushes the writer into confronting new problems through interesting topics, gives energy to persist in their solution, then carries the writer on to a new set of issues. As the writer moves through this growth cycle, there are principles of development that teachers need to understand. These must be put into practice along with the understanding of the writing process itself. Professionals who understand both areas, process and development, possess two essentials for the craft of teaching writing.
Return to Wood, "A Marriage Waiting to Happen: Computers and Process Writing"