ABSTRACT
Sondra Perl’s “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers” (1979) has deeply influenced composition pedagogy. From her meticulous coding of the writing processes of unskilled writers, Perl showed that writers have recursive, internalized processes that both help and hinder them. She demonstrated that revising for grammar during the composing stages disrupts discovery, which led to the now-universal view that editing should take place in the final stages of the writing process.
