Reflect on the passage below from Donald Murray . What is your response to this

Question

Reflect on the passage below from Donald Murray. What is your response to this passage?

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We command our students to write and grow frustrated when our "bad" students hesitate, stare out the window, dawdle over blank paper, give up and say, "I can't write," while the good students smugly pass their papers in before the end of the period.

When publishing writers visit such classrooms, however, they are astonished at students who can write on command, ejaculating correct little essays without thought, for writers have to write before writing.

----Donald Murray in "Writing Before Writing"

Explanation / Answer

Pre-writing is a stage of the writing process that is well-known to most English teachers. Pre-writing activities, such as brainstorming, can help students to figure out what they want to say before they sit down to the daunting task of writing an essay. The idea is to first do some writing in a "no stress, get it all down as fast as you can before you can stop to edit yourself" kind of fashion. No pressure, no punctuation concerns, no grammar worries, no "Am I doing this right?" types of questions. The goal of such pre-writing is discovery. Students need to discover a focus, what they care about, what they know, what they still need to find out, what they agree or disagree with, and how prior knowledge connects to new knowledge.

Learning support coaches can encourage students to develop a habit of pre-writing in the following ways:

What happens next?

Even if students try pre-writing, they often don't know what to do with the results. In a tutoring session, coaches can look over pre-writing with a student and discuss what came up on the page. Show students how to underline surprising ideas, to use circles or stars to draw attention to details that they would want to use in an essay. Talk with students about next steps, such as reorganizing the ideas from a web into a more linear flow chart that they might use as a guide for an essay, or copying over two or three poignant words onto a new blank page and doing some more pre-writing, or circling a main idea and trying to write three to five introductory paragraphs based on the main idea. The point is to show students ways to use their pre-writing productively.

After experimenting with pre-writing on a regular basis and developing a solid understanding of how to use the ideas that come up, students should be well on their way to becoming confident essay writers. Even if first drafts are still "adrift with no direction," they will be far less adrift than if no pre-writing was done. And first drafts that wind in different directions are still okay! It's all a part of the writing process, the process of discovery.

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