6 Writing as Process and Community

It’s not uncommon for college students to tell their writing instructors all about the red ink they’ve seen on the drafts of papers that were returned to them. Equally common is to hear from students that their high school English teachers simply didn’t have time to write many comments on student papers or return papers to students at all. When the paper was submitted, it was a finished product. No further revision necessary. This practice is problematic because it doesn’t teach student writers what professional writers do every day, which is to engage with writing as an ongoing process. Professional writers tend to produce many drafts and work across drafts, going back frequently to retool or overhaul whole sections of their drafts prior to submitting their work to editors for multiple copyediting and proofing passes before going to press. Even after publication, professional writers know their work on a piece is never finished. Sometimes retractions and corrections need to be issued after a piece has been published. Or as is often the case in book publishing, newer editions of a text are created based on suggested revisions or new insights. A writer’s work is never done because good writing requires the writer to adopt a recursive writing process.

College writing instructors also tend to value process over product, which means that your process as a writer doesn’t necessarily end after a particular draft is submitted for grading. On the contrary, you might think more expansively in terms of your process as a writer by reflecting on how you typically begin brainstorming, how you move through stages of drafting, receive feedback from peers or your instructor, revise according to that feedback, and then return for additional revisions as your thinking on the piece develops. In other words, just because you may be finished writing one draft does not mean that your work as a writer is complete. We are best served when we think about how our ideas transcend the page, moving across drafts and sometimes even across assignments to strengthen how we communicate with a broad audience of readers.

Moreover, college-level writing courses often offer a sense of being in community with other writers. American literary theorist Kenneth Burke is frequently cited for his description of academic writing as entering a kind of parlor or a room in which people are gathering and a lively conversation is underway. Burke writes,

You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (110-111)

Whether you realize it or not, when you write your ideas are always informed by the ideas of those who came before you. Your writing is part of a larger, ongoing community that has been in conversation with other interested community members for quite some time now, and this community should give you a sense of audience, purpose, and context. Similarly, peer review is a staple practice in college writing courses. Your instructor is very likely to ask you to trade drafts with another student writer to provide constructive feedback that will help to improve your writing and give you a sense of community that functions as an audience as well.