ABSTRACT

Why is it important to study writing processes? The first and central reason is that writing processes are where texts come from. If you want to understand why a text is written as it is, how it might have been written differently, how it came to meet some goals but not others, how it could have been written better, then it makes sense to look not just at the text itself, but at the history of work and the varied materials from which the text was produced. In the 1970s, a number of researchers and teachers came to the conclusion that processes of writing are fundamental to understanding, teaching, and learning writing, that writing is not about learning and applying formulas for making fixed kinds of texts, but about ways of workingways of acting-that align writers, readers, texts, and contexts.