LEARNING GOAL – Composing Processes

WRITING AS A PROCESS

The third major area of learning goals for our class falls under the header of “Composing Processes.” The main idea here is to deepen your understanding of the way that all acts of communication — or rather, successful communication — are the result of an ongoing process, not a “one time” event.

Consider these famous sayings:

The common thread is that writing effectively — in other words, crafting a message that has a particular impact on a particular audience — is the result of an ongoing process that requires multiple steps. No one, not even the most skilled and experienced of writers, is able to produce a rhetorically effective message of any complexity without going through multiple revisions.

In fact, many of the writers we think of as being highly skilled tended to write terrible first drafts, because what makes a writer skilled isn’t what the writer produces in a first draft, but what the writer produces in a final draft, after many revisions. This also true for all kinds of writing, including writing lyrics for music or screenplays for film.

If you’ve felt discouraged about your writing skills in the past, it’s entirely possible you simply haven’t yet spent enough time on revision. You can do amazing things with a little rewriting! If you tend to receive favorable comments on your writing even without doing any revision, there’s no telling how powerful your writing could potentially be if you put more effort into revising and polishing it.

PRACTICING THE PROCESS

Below is my paraphrased version of the steps that the Colorado Commission for Higher Education (CCHE) has defined as being important for all students to learn in order to “extend [their] experience in composing processes.” In this class, you will have the opportunity to practice these steps as you work on a variety of projects.

You will often be directed to try different strategies as you work on each project, which gives you some choice over the composing processes you work on developing, but you’ll also be asked to describe those strategies in your self-evaluations for each project, and it’s in that description that I’ll be able to tell how seriously you engaged with each process.

• Generate ideas for projects using exploratory strategies such as freewriting, brainstorming, doodling, and so on, within a private journal intended for your eyes only
• Develop projects using planning strategies appropriate to the new media format, such as sketch outlines, exploratory drafts, storyboards, pitches, and so on
• Articulate and support a clear thesis or controlling idea appropriate to the rhetorical situation
• Revise and restructure early drafts in response to your emerging understanding of the issue as well as peer feedback
• Revise and restructure later drafts using strategies appropriate to your purpose, audience, and genre
• Offer thoughtful and substantial comments on peer drafts
• Adapt relevant aspects of the print-based writing process to the process of composing digital and multimodal texts for online audiences (for example, using storyboards rather than outlines for visual messages and producing “treatments” or “rough cuts” as drafts of multimedia projects)