Murray and the 'process'

I was very interested in Murray’s thoughts on writing. I think that his focus on pre-vision, vision and re-vision is an effective way to let students know what the writing process should look like. As an English teacher, we are constantly trying to stress the importance of the process involved with writing, usually with little effect.
I particularly liked the idea that you should not start writing until you had taken a significant amount of time to discuss your work with yourself. This is something that writers do that seems foreign to students. They are under the impression that they should begin writing right away in order to finish quickly. They take no time for thinking over the information. They take no time develop an argument to guide their work. They take no time to reach some point of destination for their work. They just sit, and usually end up staring at a blank page until they finally exclaim, “I don’t know what to say.” It would be interesting to give them an assignment that prohibited any written work until they could discuss their subject with themselves, or another student. It would be equally interesting to present them with the idea of a writing signal that ‘tells’ students when they should begin writing.
The vision phase is often seen as a condensed version of the re-vision phase. Students begin to revise too early in the process. They spend too little time developing an order and meaning to their work and focus on spelling and grammar errors. This leaves students with a seemingly wandering sense of order in their work. Without enough time to develop meaning, students are left with very thin arguments and little support. They don’t put the appropriate effort into the ground work, and they are left lacking in the end.
The final phase of writing is where students seem to jump to before they work on the real structure of their writing. The re-vision phase focuses on the voice of the paper, and the final editing of the mechanics. While this is an important step, it is not the most important step. If a student spends the majority of his writing time here, he loses the time that should be spent developing and crafting a paper. The edit, according to Murray is the last act of the writer in order to become the reader’s advocate. Even if a work is free from errors and is easy to read, that does not guarantee that there is anything worth reading.
The discussion of the environment that accompanies writing was also interesting. We sometimes forget that our students are going to react to the way that we present an assignment, and not just the content of that assignment. If we continue to force students to write within a rigid frame, we are going to push them even further away from writing. We have taken one of our most basic means of communication and alienated our students from it.