Prewriting is everything that takes place before the first draft.
Prewriting usually takes about 85 percent of the writer’s time…
Pre-writing may include research and daydreaming, note-making and
outlining, title-writing and lead-writing.
(From Murray’s “Teaching Writing as a Process Not Product”, pp. 2-3)
I am impressed and surprised to find these words in Murray’s article. This is often my biggest beef with writing instructors; I have rarely encountered any instructor who taught this concept to his/her students. So often the focus is on the act of writing–the act of typing words into the big blank white square of Microsoft Word. So often I’ve heard teachers say things like, “Start writing your introduction… just get your ideas on the page.” Or, “As you write, your ideas will come to the surface.” And on the listening end, students who are already hellbent on meeting the required page length start typing and writing hysterically, without ANY IDEA of what they want to say. Et voila! Le terrible paper.
As instructors we are so often focused on the 15 percent — the writing and the rewriting. “This is how to avoid a comma splice”; “You didn’t write in MLA format”; “Go back and make these edits”; “Work on your rough draft and we’ll go from there”.
When was the last time we spent even a full CLASS period, let alone Murray’s proportional “85 percent” of our instructional time, teaching our students how to “research and daydream…”, make notes, outline, brainstorm titles or leads?
I find this whole 85/15 thing a critical element in the current debate about what we should have students write about: readings they don’t care about, or personal passion areas? The reality is the latter topics are often producing better writing in part because the students don’t need the pre-writing phase (or at least to the same extent they do for the former). I.e., you don’t need to research and daydream and brainstorm about the benefits of deep sea fishing if you naturally take an interest in it–you’ve been organically “pre-writing” in your personal life long before you entered the classroom.
I could go on about this because I think the 85/15 thing is fascinating, but consider… If pre-writing is this important (and I think it is), how do we teach it? How do we drastically alter our pedagogy and our content to address the pre-writing phase? One might also argue that if instructors are largely unconcerned with teaching pre-writing, as they seem to be, what’s stopping us from moving into this heavier focus on personal interest areas in our writing courses?