The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders / Chapter 3

Emig, Janet. The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1971.

Chapter 3: The Composing Process: Mode of Analysis

In this chapter, Emig presents both an outline and a narrative that describe the “elements, moemnts and stages within the composing process” of the 8 12th-grade subjects she chose to study. Here are some of the highlights:

1. All writing emerges from a stimulus. There are different kinds of stimuli (what prompts a student to write). That stimulus affects the kind of writing that emerges, specifically the mode and the tenor of it. (tenor = level of formality) Emig adopts and adapts R.N. Wilson’s categories for the 4 types of experiences – or fields of discourse - that cause students to write: encounters with the natural world, human interrelations, the self, and “encounters with induced environments or artifacts” – aka school assignments. Also, Emig updates Britton, Rosen, and Martin’s characterization of expressive student writing as either poetic (acting as spectator) and communicative (acting as participant) into reflexive and extensive writing. Reflexive asks “what does this experience mean?” and extensive asks, “How, because of this experience, do I interact with my environment?” (37) These 2 categories aren’t as cut-and-dry as “poetic” and “communicative” – activeness and passivity bleed into one another.
2. The way a student receives an assignment is based on the registers of the assignment (the field, mode, and tenor of discourse), how the assignment is worded, how the student understands the assignment, the student’s ability to perform and complete the assignment, and the student’s motivation to compete the assignmnet. We must keep in mind that students might have differing degrees of success in writing in all the different modes.
3. Prewriting is everything that happens between when a student recieves a stimulus to write and begins to the think about it to when they first start to write. It happens once.
4. Planning is all the work the student does – both in writing and out loud – to compose a piece. It can happen numerous times. The more parameters a teacher gives for an assignment, the less prewriting and planning a student does. However, the teacher has to walk a fine line from constricting a student and overwhelming them with an open book of ambiguity when it comes to a writing assignment.
5. Interveners and Interventions – during the process of writing, events and people will affect the student and thus affect the piece he or she is writing.
6. Starting – “when the id…breaks through the controls usually exerted by the ego and super-ego.” (40) This stage is easily observed, but the first thing a writer writes isn’t necessarily the first line of the finished piece.
7. Composing – Emig points out that composing out loud is different from composing on the page. Composing out loud requires more anticipation than planning (students do not see the piece as a whole before starting, so they can only anticipate a section of it.) When composing, students accept or abandon elements of discourse in their piece or choose to synthesize or substitute a new element with other elements already in the piece. Composing also gives birth to a certain style, characterized by certain grammatical and syntatic structures that repeat (in writing) and a tempo (in composing out loud.)
8. Reformulation – this does not happen in out-loud compositions, but in writing, students reformulate their peices by correcting mechanical and style errors, revising bigger sections for more global reasons (organization, point of view), and/or entirely rewriting the entire piece (or almost all of it).
9. Stopping – pretty self-explanatory. The writer stops writing. Emig says that the writer stops most easily when the deadline coincides with the writer’s belief that he or she has successfully written the piece.
10. Contemplation of Product – the writer looks back on his or her work to evaluate its effectiveness.
11. Seeming Teacher Influence on Piece – how did the teacher affect this piece? This is determined not only by the teacher’s evaluation of the piece. To answer this, you need to listen to student’s own statements about the piece they wrote, look at how they are writing the piece, listen to how students describe the writing instruction they are receiving, and look at how teachers are actually teaching composition in the classroom.

The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders / Chapter 2

Emig, Janet. The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1971.

Chapter 2: The Design of the Study

This chapter, as noted, is how the study on the writing processes of 12th graders was designed. Here are the nitpicky details on the students who participated:

• 8 students participated:
  • 5 girls, 3 boys
  • 6 white, 1 African-American, 1 Asian-American
• They came from 6 high schools around Chicago:
  • 1 all-white, upper-class suburban school
  • 1 ethnically and economically diverse school north of the city, well-known as one of the nation’s best
  • 1 ethnically diverse, lower-middle-class suburban school
  • 1 ethnically and economically diverse Chicago city school
  • 1 “ghetto” Chicago city school that was almost exclusively black
  • 1 private school affiliated with a local university
• All the students were considered to be average to above-average in intelligence
• 6 of the students were recognized for their above-average ability as writers; the other 2 were noticed for their interest in writing (not necessarily their aptitude for it.)

 So, basically, a group of above-average students from a slew of different backgrounds in and around Chicago.

Here’s what the students did during the study:

• Session 1: had a 20-minute conversation with the researcher, then composed out loud and wrote down a small piece in whatever mode or form they wanted. This was tape-recorded and observed. Then, the students had to write for homework a composition about a person, event, or idea that interests them.
• Session 2: another out-loud composition. Then, the students was interviewed about their planning/prewriting techniques that they did to write the previous week’s homework.
• Session 3: the students gave a “writing autobiography” – they talked about all the writing and reading related to writing that they had done in their lives so far. 6 students brought in writing samples.
• Session 4: the students had to write an imaginative piece of writing between Session 3 and 4 (7-10 days) and keep track of the prewriting and composing strategies they used while writing the piece. This description was tape-recorded.

 Why was the study conceived this way? So that students would write both “reflexive and extensive” modes. It didn’t work out that way. The first 2 “compose aloud” sessions and the first homework composition were supposed to elicit personal, reflexive writing, but the writing that was produced was not reflective or “engaged.”

And, only 6 of the 8 subjects did the last assignment (recording their composing process for writing the piece of poetry or fiction.)