I enjoyed researching Donald Murray because I was lucky enough to land a guy whose theory makes sense to me. Murray’s legacy is one of giving. His teaching style was based on listening first and then adjusting his ideas to fit the needs of this students, or in the case of most of his texts, teachers. As a failure of the high school system, Murray understood the flaws of the system, and he spent the majority of his life trying to fix them. For forty years Murray attended meetings with teachers, wrote down their fears, problems, and anxieties, and he wrote books to try and help them teach. The most awe-inspiring piece I read during this research was not anything Murray wrote; the piece that made me actually want to read about this man was his memorial page on Poynter Online. People from around the world poured their hearts out while they described how this teacher whom many had never met changed their lives. His methods might appear simplistic and a little out there, but I find most of his advice to be right on.
To expand upon his advice is to introduce his contribution to composition theory. Murray’s theory can be summed up in one word: vision or more precisely pre-vision, vision, and re-vision. While writing should be organic and full of surprises, it should also be focused with an end product in mind. I like to think of this theory as product driven, but process oriented. By vision, Murray did not mean that every line or phrase should be planned out. What he meant was that a writer should not write until he or she knows WHAT they intend to write about. This may come as a slap in the face to those familiar with organized prewriting, which Murray found perfectly acceptable if one was presented with an immediate task, but Murray found internal dialogue to be more effective than aimless scribbling. He called his idea “rehearsal,” and in this state a writer organizes his thoughts, makes arguments, and searches for support, all without the aid of a pen or keyboard.
Once the writer has carried the internal dialogue as far as it can go, he receives a signal. Murray found through his own empirical research that there are eight basic signals one might receive. I only briefly outlined them during my presentation, so here they are with a little more detail. Some of the signals deal with putting ideas into a pattern, others deal with altering one’s perspective or lens, still others affect the writer by answering a question he didn’t even know he was asking.
1. Genre – the writer uses literary traditions to understand life
2. Point of View – what perspective will the writer take?
3. Voice – The language of the internal dialogue might reveal attitude
4. News – What does the reader need or want to know?
5. Line – One line from internal dialogue or rough notes that moves them
6. Image – Sometimes static, sometimes moving—the image inspires
7. Pattern – Not an outline, but the entire piece of writing becomes the image
8. Problem – Writer might find that an answer is not their focus, but the problem
After the writer receives the signal to write, he begins with a vision of what the final product should resemble, but the path can have surprises; as the draft progresses, the writer may change his mind or find new ideas to add to those that have already been established. In this vision or drafting stage the writer’s responsibilities entail placing the lines the information into a sequence that anticipates and answers the reader’s questions and serving the reader with a satisfying amount of information that makes the writer’s meaning clear.
Like many other processes of writing, the last deals with editing or re-vision. Here the writer must add voice as he “tunes the language of the draft so that the music of the words support and reinforce the meaning.” The writer must become the reader’s advocate and makes sure that any “exceptions to tradition clarify the meaning.”
For further reading, here are a few links I used in my research including the Poynter Online.
Janice Harayda (one of Murray’s students) remembers the man
http://oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/01/01/donald-m-murray-1924-2006/
“Anatomy of a high school dropout” by Jeanne Jacoby Smith
http://www.worldandi.com/public/1998/july/smith.cfm
“Write Before Writing” by Donald Murray
http://wserver.crc.losrios.edu/~morales/Readings/Murray,%20Donald%20-%20Write%20Before%20Writing.pdf
Poynter Online
http://poynter.org/article_feedback/article_feedback_list.asp?user=&id=115922#17458
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Tony,
ReplyDeleteI am intrigued by what seems to me an apparent contradiction in Murray's process. Your presentation presented the idea of pre-vision, the mental development of the piece until a sign is encountered that one is ready to write. At the same time, in Compbiblio's section on Murray he is cited repeatedly as promoting a regimen of daily writing, which to me, seems to be forcing thought into that physical pre-writing that Murray seems to feel is most beneficially conducted mentally.
Did you encounter anything in your research that addressed this apparent contradiction? Did he perhaps promote a daily regimen of journal writing or something similarly personal and especially expressivist, or was it really part of his regimen to write daily regardless of his state of mental readiness to write?
I have encountered both ideas ("You're a writer so write regardless of mood etc." and "Wait for the striking of the muse") from various writers talking about writing and wondered how Murray balanced what seems to have been a compromise position.
Murray’s motto was borrowed from Horace: “Never a day without a line.” The contradiction is only apparent when one imagines the rehearsal stage of writing as taking a significant amount of time. Murray was not writing book chapters or short stories each day, instead he was writing about 500 words. His theory regarding mental development of a piece would still apply; however, Murray was not against journaling for personal pleasure or emotional release; in fact, he participated in both. It seems that I should have broadened my description of Murray rather than only focusing on his contribution to composition theory. I hope this answers your question, but if not, please bring it up in class tonight.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the additional info, Tony! I would have liked to hear more about Murray last week, but we were all in a rush to get out of there. His ideas seem simple but entirely sensible. You write: "His teaching style was based on listening first and then adjusting his ideas to fit the needs of his students, or in the case of most of his texts, teachers." It seems to me that good teaching is 50% listening and 50% giving clear instruction, thus rendering expectations transparent for both students and teachers. We've all had teachers who were either apathetic or whose brains were mixed up in a blender. And unfortunately, we've all had teachers who were both. Murray appears to be a good remedy for such incompetence.
ReplyDeleteResponding to Scott: daily journal writing, or any kind of writing for one's self (i.e. an audience of one) already has pre-vision built in. Of course, there's always that moment of hesitation before one begins to write a journal. I've started dozens of old-fashioned journals and blogs (none of them lasting very long because I find the process tedious), and my greatest concern at the outset is scope. What should this thing include? What should it exclude? Once you get past that hurdle, the rest will follow automatically day by day. I for one would rather start and finish a bigger project (like a novel) because I crave the constant demands of structure.
I think that the contradiction is there if we assume that pre-vision takes days and months before we are able to sit and write. The amount of time needed to 'think over' our writing is very closely tied to the length of that particular piece. If you are working on a dissertation-sized work, your pre-vision is going to take longer to percolate into a coherent thought. If, on the other hand, you are using a daily regimen of writing, and there is not necessarily a specific end that you are trying to accomplish, the pre-vision make take only a few minutes. You are able to put together a few simple thoughts more readily than a large argument.
ReplyDeleteTony, you did a good job presenting a lot of information in a short time, and this added information really helps. I wanted to hear more and was sorry that we had to race away without further discussion. This helps me to understand more Murray’s idea of pre-visioning. It isn’t exactly as I had understood it. My first instinct was to argue, to repeat the old adage that we don’t know what we think until we write it. However, I know that I do a lot of prewriting in my head. In fact, I am often caught short when I am instructed to sit down and write (as you started us!) because I haven’t had a chance to give any thought to the subject or to how I want to present my ideas. I usually do not perform well in completely spontaneous settings for that reason. I like to mull something over, even if it’s just for a few minutes.
ReplyDeleteMany of my Asian students tell me that it is impolite in their culture to answer a question immediately, because a hesitation indicates that they have taken the time to think over the question to form an appropriate response. And yet, American teachers usually allow too little time for a response, sometimes less than one second. That doesn’t allow much space for pre-vision. We are not usually encouraged to spend much time pre-visioning our thoughts orally or in writing.
MODISTA! Seriously, I think you did a very nice job presentin Mr. Murray. I am going to jump on the contradiction bandwangon here for a minute. Journal writing is a thought and process much like Murray descirbes. I have to disagree with Scott that Tony contradicted himself. We think constantly, and most of the time responses in journals are based on the dialogue within our heads. Pre-vision is what we do on a daily basis in our daily lives. Vision is when we make our pre-vision real, and the re-vision is retrospect. This is a process everyone follows whether they realize it or not.
ReplyDeleteI must agree with Klayton about the 50/50 ratio. That is what makes a teacher effective in the classroom. We must listen as much as instruct, that is the only way to grow as an educator and revamp or reevaluate what is working and what is not working. I really like Murray's approach.
Murray and Elbow are similar in that they grew out of their early failures in school/writing.
ReplyDeleteI think that is a common way that we do learn if we can use those disappointing times in our lives and build on them. Is that the same as knowing your culture and where we came from?