A Wordless Process - What’s the Impact of Naming Writing Process Steps?

I listened to an amazing essay about wordlessness the other day. Lulu Miller, radiolab, posted 2/18/22, reading her essay, ‘The Eleventh Word’. Apparently, there’s this theory — the Zeigarnik effect — that, in some ways, we understand more about something before we have words for it. Before we have words, we can perceive all the (or more of the) nuances of a phenomenon, but once we have words that categorize it, we wrap the definition around our experiences and essentially lock our perception into particular keyholes.

Click - if you go through that door, you’ll experience “A Summer Day.”

Click - if you go through that door, you’ll be in the “Hiking” room.

Click - if you go through that door, you’ll be in the realm we call “Parenthood”

And everything we can see, touch, smell, hear, taste, everything we can perceive, is suddenly contained within those rooms. And the other thing that happens is, we stop perceiving things that don’t align with our understanding of the definition.

In her essay, Lulu Miller talks about sitting in the park:

…under a heavy beam of wood that could kill me in an instant. But I trusted it wouldn’t, because I had named that thing branch. In that same park, I watched a man, face twisted, run hard in my direction. But I trusted he would not kill me, was not running from a thing that might kill me, because I named him jogger. In that same park, dozens of ten-ton death machines whizzed by. I named them truck. I named the flat ribbon of asphalt road, and in road I trusted. With each word comes a false set of assurances. That now you know how it will behave.

This feels so connected to writing process. Before we have words for pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing, we engage in those actions in ways that mix up their ‘order’, mash them together, twist them around, re-mix freely. Once we know what they are, we often lock them into order, minimizing their potential.

At the same time, for student writers, naming the nuances of their writing actions can be incredibly beneficial. It’s similar to how a baseball coach might run drills that break apart the components of hitting a ball in order to improve a player’s swing—attending to just one bit is easier than trying to improve everything at once. Teaching writing process with nuance is key.

In other words, students need broader definitions for ‘how to write’ than, “One must pre-write by making an outline.”

So, what are some ways to help young writers tune their process without demanding that they pre-write on Monday, draft on Tuesday, revise on Wednesday, edit on Thursday, and publish on Friday? Well, here are three:

• Give writers time to talk about how they’re working on their pieces. What parts do they write first? What do they decide in advance? When do they like to just write whatever comes to mind? What ways of writing bring them joy?

• Invite writers to try out a new approach, just to see how they feel about it. Have them reflect on how effective it felt for them. When some tell you that it was useless (at least 5 definitely will), normalize that. After all, I haven’t ever, ever created a graphic organizer unless it was required homework. However, I will write a million short entries around a topic.

• After they complete a piece, have writers talk about how they got from its start to its completion. When did they get stuck? How did they get unstuck? When was the writing enjoyable? When was it painful? Ultimately, what was most useful?

Want to (re)think some more about writing process? Check this out:

Coppola, S. (2017). Renew!: Become a Better-and More Authentic-writing Teacher. Stenhouse Publishers.