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.