The Writing Process

  By Writing Resources

This is a post on the history and efficacy of the writing process as taught in the Humanities makerspace. We always start with Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist — all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

All instructional posts, printable handouts, worksheets, etc., are kept here: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?page_id=4661.

For easy reference, this is the most recent version of the writing guide that is explored and explained below: https://tinyurl.com/sisyphus-writes.

Read on for the exploration and explanation of writing in a makerspace.

Rosetta Stones

The writing process we use has most often been called bishop composition, which is the name it has on the main Sisyphean High site. As that site notes, the more recent versions of the writing process have been posted, reposted, and refined through this instructional website. It is refined through hands-on instruction1

With the most recent iteration, the focus of the writing process is adaptability in the face of inevitable curricular dissonance. It’s about a universal language that students can take with them. Consider what Gerald Graff (an influential writer whose They Say / I Say is taught in many high schools, including ours) and Steve Benton published about this in 2013:

[C]urricular dissonance also does much to widen the achievement gap. The high achievers manage to synthesize the mixed messages on their own and thereby deepen their learning from course to course, but the rest do not. For them, education is not a cumulative process, but a bizarre obstacle course in which students must virtually start from scratch every time they enter a new course. Who can blame them if they come away believing that education is just a cynical business of learning enough to get past one teacher and then setting aside those lessons to meet the unrelated or conflicting demands of the next one?

This matches what you see in a high school. Students move from class to class and year to year without a guarantee that things will stay the same. That “bizarre obstacle course” persists, even when progressive systems like Brewster develop ways to bring teachers together — and Brewster’s Strategic Coherence Plan really does give students universal languages for assessing their own learning.

The high achievers’ ability to navigate this is the key. That ability can be learned, and all students need to know how to “synthesize the mixed messages on their own and thereby deepen their learning,” as Graff and Benton put it. We need to teach deeper skills and develop persistent traits in students2.

That’s obviously how we ended up with grade abatement in the makerspace, since it universalizes learning and assessment. Writing is the next problem to tackle: We need a Rosetta stone that can be used to translate any and all rubrics, processes, and prompts.

(I think that adapting students to curricular dissonance will eventually be the preface to everything the makerspace does — and perhaps its central purpose, in the end. Lifelong learning is really about substructural strength and understanding of oneself.)

In terms of writing, we should look back at the Postman quotation at the top: Writing is a mechanism for interpreting and responding to the world around us. Students need the power that writing gives them to build themselves up. It’s a power that professional writers describe frequently, which is why the most recent iteration of the process (see below) includes plenty of quotations from famous writers.

Brief notes and direct links to each iteration are below. Use the comment section at the end to ask questions.

The Latest Iteration

Here is the most recent version of our universal writing process. These links should help students to learn, practice, and master the process:

Version 4

Direct link: The Writing Process: V4 (2019)

This version leans into the idea of valuing process over product3 It doesn’t diminish product, though, which is why the central metaphor is stonework. We are making something solid.

This iteration is being tested in 2019 in all classes through prompts like this one:

What’s In Your Name?

The idea is to eliminate many of the complicated rubrics and grids and to replace it all with questions, answers, and straightforward definitions. The shaping of a writing response happens in class or interstitially through expert feedback and peer-to-peer collaboration. The older, more complicated versions work in a similar way — and work, too, overall, it’s important to note — but they are less immediately accessible.

Because essays are the most common kind of writing we do in school, this process is designed to help most with essay prompts. Theoretically, any other kind of writing can be run through the same process, but a high school makerspace can probably only handle shorter forms, like poetry.

Speaking of essays, this current iteration relies heavily on Paul Graham’s “The Age of the Essay,” which is pretty much required reading:

Questions aren’t enough. An essay has to come up with answers. They don’t always, of course. Sometimes you start with a promising question and get nowhere. But those you don’t publish. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn’t already know… Err on the side of the river. An essay is not a reference work. It’s not something you read looking for a specific answer, and feel cheated if you don’t find it. I’d much rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along a prescribed course.

Emphasis mine. Rivers and stones work well as metaphors, because they speak to the slow and powerful process of shaping thought into something more concrete. if nothing else, logic like Graham’s helps us move away from the writing assignments he describes as “three steps removed from real work,” which is further explained in his essay.

Version 3

Direct Link: The Writing Process: v3

Sort these documents by name, and you’ll get a four-step process, plus a universal rubric and a model of how to use the process to analyze and emulate a professional writer’s essay.

The latter is probably the most useful document for all students. It analyzes this article from 2013:

That is taken deliberately from an unlikely source. It’s an example, as I noted in the comments on it, of how the real world communicates important ideas. Here is a direct link to the analysis PDF: ETA Model: Will Lietch, “Why That Dumb AIDS Tweet Was So Captivating”

The “lite” and “full” versions of the writing process are also useful, of course. It bears repeating: These older versions work, and work well, but there will be a benefit to prioritizing 2019’s straightforward question-and-answer format.

(If nothing else, as some students have already pointed out, the “DAMAGES” mnemonic used through 2018 is bit too violent. It might be a memorable, but it suggests more of a focus on criticism and deficiency than on risk-taking and growth.)

Version 2

Direct link: The Writing Process: V2

The step-by-step guide in this folder was split into the “lite” and “full” versions in Version 3. The rest of the material here deals with scoring and marking up essays. As necessary, I could still take a student’s essay and dissect its effectiveness through this kind of tool:

That’s especially useful with the original DAMAGES rubric, which you can read by clicking the image or the hyperlink in this sentence.

Because grades are no longer used for essays in our makerspace4, the most useful element in this folder is the post-writing protocol:

That protocol is probably worth dusting off for use in the future, at least to see if helps students who struggle with reflective and metacognitive work.

Version 1

Direct link: The Writing Process: V1

The guide in this folder is the first one written for the DAMAGES rubric, which was the center of the writing process for a long time. For students really interesting in writing as a craft, it offers a deeper dive into that process.

The rubric in this folder is another way to generate feedback for an essay. The language in each box is meant to be actionable, and it can obviously be mapped onto the categories in the most recent version. Here is the direct link.

A Few Examples

Before asking any questions in the comment section below, spend some time looking at examples of student writing produced by this process. For recent work, load the following site:

And for contrast, here is one of the earliest collections:

View at Medium.com

  1. Which is true for grade abatement, as well, although the most recent process post on GAP scoring — this one — is fairly comprehensive and hasn’t needed an update all year. ↩

  2. This is the Sisyphus metaphor again: We can’t guarantee that the system will change, or that any systemic change will persist, but we can find stability in ourselves in the moment when we start again at the foot of the mountain. ↩

  3. For an interesting take on this, read this article: Why Typical Preschool Crafts Are a Total Waste of Time. It emphasizes the need for direction, feedback, and support when we prioritize the process. ↩

  4. These older, grade-based documents could still be used in the space, however. If a student truly wanted to see an essay subjected to this kind of post-mortem evaluation, and if the efficacy of that evaluation was clear, then that’s what we would do. ↩

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