Mid-Term II: Donald Murray

IV. Donald M. Murray
Write before you write! Donald Murray was the director of the writing program at the University of New Hampshire and spent one of his careers teaching writing and teaching writing teachers. Murray’s scholarly work seems to focus highly on the writing process and on pedagogy. There does not seem to be any evidence of the type of philosophical purpose of the class debates that occur in the other major process figure we’ve covered in class Peter Elbow. Murray, like Elbow, derives his position in academia and his position as a writer from a determination to overcome dropping out of high school not once but twice before going back to school to study writing, finishing both high school and college at the same time and going on to become the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history while working as a journalist for the Boston Herald.

Murray’s work on the writing process focuses on the importance of the stages of pre-writing and Revision. Murray’s work on prewriting literally focuses on pre-writing activities as opposed to the pre-drafting­ activities taught as prewriting such as brainstorming, freewriting, etc. Notice these activities all actually involve putting pen to paper (even if metaphorically through digital interface). Murray focuses on the period of mental preparation that precedes even these pre-drafting activities, and which he calls rehearsal. He claims that the writer naturally delays, and that this is healthy and should be encouraged as the subconscious is at work on the writing problem. He even lists a series of signs that the subconscious will provide to indicate to the writer that it is time to begin. Beginning before the arrival of one or more of these signs will simply lead to frustration as the mind has not finished its rehearsal process.
Murray’s pedagogical work that I have most encountered is his focus on the conference as a primary tool for teaching writing. The interaction described at the conferences seems a Socratic approach based on drawing the knowledge from the students (or opening their eyes to new knowledge) by questioning them about their papers. Murray with a slight facetious wink, says that he does nothing, and that students do all the work. Jokingly he says that he is waiting to be found out and fired. In fact, he is pointing out to the reader that it is unnecessary for him to do more than guide the student towards the problems, that the discovery model/Socratic approach he is using involves very little direct instruction and does not assume that he actually knows exactly what to do with the students’ papers.