Bishop: Released into Language

Bishop, Wendy. *Released into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing*. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1990.

Bishop's book focuses on bringing comp theory, especially comp theory that focuses on the writing process, over to creative writing pedagogy. She's best for her leads, which are all 70s and 80s stuff. I think comp theory moved on from process, but I suppose there are still some process folks around. I'll need to look for more current stuff in addition to her leads.

I guess this means that CW people like Harris who are calling for process theory are about 30-40 years behind comp theory? Or, at least, they are doing what comp people were doing 40 years back.

She distinguishes between the "traditional" and the "transactional" workshops. Traditional focus on text, transactional on process.

She sums up the comp research like so:

Cognitive research helps writing teachers understand the basic writer as someone who is rule governed (generally inappropriately so), who has trouble imagining audiences other than herself, and who has inflexible revising and writing strategies and an underdeveloped sense of the composing process. Successful writers are...able to decide upon audience and to tailor the developing text to audience demands and rhetorical demands. The successful writer not only has flexible composing and revising strategies but also has a wealth of successful, previous writing experience to draw on, enabling her to make and adjust writing goals to suit a particular writing situation. And it is this fluency, flexibility, and sense of a writer as someone who writes that can be highlighted in the creative writing workshop. (22)

That's all I got from her. The rest was options for classroom exercises and methods of grading student work.


Leads:

Looks like I can probably start with Flowers and Hayes
Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. 1981. "A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing." *College Composition and Communication* 32:365-87.

...actually I think Hayes had an article in our Literacy book that developed that model further...

For critics/extensions of process she cites "structural social theorists":
Pat Bizzell (1984) "What happens when basic writers come to college" --this one was a presentation as it turns out.

Marilyn Cooper (1986) "The Ecology of Writing." College English 31: 134-42.

Kenneth Bruffee (1984) "Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind." College english 46: 635-52.

these folks say "composing does not occur only for an individual...or in the head...but also in complex social settings which affect the ways in which both basic and professional writers write" (23)

and ethnographic studies:
Heath (1983) *Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms*. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Harste, Woodward, and Burke (1984) *Language Stories and Literacy Lessons.* Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.

She says these ones "let us see that composing is transactional, negotiated by writers within households, schools, and communities, and that social/biographical factors also affect the writing of any individual" (23)

Says these two have more on these theories:
Faigley, Lester. 1986. "Competing Theories of Process." *College English* 48 (October): 527-42.

Berlin 1987 *Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985.* Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
----- 1984 Writing Instruction in 19th Century American Colleges.