Context:

As I enter into the parlor around theories of writing, I feel greatly out of my depth. That is why I am grateful for the challenge of this key term exploration. In general, I feel as though I have learned how to understand the conversations happening around me. I understand the tenor of its purpose, and a summary of its content. But it has been a challenge to understand the contextual history of how writing theories have developed. Especially within the debates and conflicts over the last 50 years. Most of the “key terms” of the field, carry baggage, and convoluted connotations. So I started with a term that I  barely understood and that has caused significant dissonance within our field: expressivism. Below is my attempt to take a pulse of the conversation around expressivism over the last 50 years. Although this only skims the surface, it has already eliminated areas of confusion in my understanding of expressivism. 

• 1963: Donald Murray (considered the “George Washington” of writing center pedagogy). He wrote the essay “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product”

  • Bio: “Murray, a survivor of the Great Depression and World War II, reached the pinnacle of success in American journalism in the mid 1950s when he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, became an editor at Time magazine and then an accomplished and prolific freelance writer who placed essays and stories in some of the most well-known general interest publications of the post-war era.“ (6).
• 1970s: 

  • Donald Murray = Expressivist was borne out of efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to describe the theories, philosophies, and rhetorics guiding composition pedagogy at the time 
  • 1973-1979 University of Pittsburgh had an Alternate Curriculum program that specifically taught Expressivist theories of writing, and enabled nontraditional modes of education to equip their students.
    • “students were encouraged to approach peer review, an important aspect of expressive pedagogy, as a critical and rhetorical practice. “
    • “Students, for example, engaged in personal writing activities to experiment with alternative writing styles, to build a group identity as members of the program, and to critique American higher education and its marginalization of alternative learning programs such as the Alternative Curriculum”
  • 1973 Peter Elbow publishes Writing Without Teachers. And is widely criticized/ labeled as a foundation of expressivism. Elbow himself does not agree with this label though.
    • “When Berlin called me a poster boy for expressivism in the 1980s, he must have been thinking mostly about my Writing Without Teachers, published in 1973. For his later article in 1988, he also looked at Writing With Power (1985) but that book is remarkably impersonal compared to the 1973 book. So I will be referring here mostly to Writing Without Teachers in trying to figure out why I was so identified with personal writing.” (Elbow, #)
    • “But in preaching freewriting, I was preaching a process—a process designed to lead to any kind of product, not personal writing. Freewriting is a means to an end—to help you learn to write more fluently and easily and to find more words and thoughts. The process has no bias at all toward personal writing. “ (Elbow)
• 1977:

  • “There is a second crucial point to make about Henze et al.’s invocation of the Donald Murray = Expressivist frame in 1977. As “independent agents,” they write, students were to “intuit principles of effective writing through trial and error.” As we have seen, Murray never conceived of students as “independent agents” and while it is true to say that he wanted students to learn to write through a process resembling trial and error, it’s not true to say that he wanted them to “intuit” a set of principles of effective writing because he did not believe such things existed.” (Connors)
• 1988s: James Berlin ridicules Expressivism 

  • at the end of his book Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class, Berlin states regarding expressivism: ““it should now be apparent that a way of teaching is never innocent. Every pedagogy is imbricated in ideology, is a set of tacit assumptions about what is real, what is good, what is possible, and how power ought to be distributed.” ““a rhetoric cannot escape the ideological question, and to ignore this is to fail our responsibilities as teachers and as citizens” (Berlin, 493).
  • This is true- Elbow agrees! But Elbow approaches this with more grace and including than negativity. 
  • Murray is ridiculed as
    • “As an expressivist, Murray was deemed an advocate of a politically naïve and ineffectual writing pedagogy that failed to account for the socio-cultural and political aspects of composing.” (Connors, 6).
    • “A careful rereading of “Rhetoric and Ideology” suggests that Berlin’s condemnation of expressionistic rhetoric ultimately boils down to its too-great focus on the individual as the locus of social change. “For expressionistic rhetoric,” he writes, “the correct response to the imposition of current economic, political, and social arrangements is thus resistance, but a resistance that is always construed in individual terms” (487). Expressionistic rhetoric, he continues, is “inherently and debilitatingly divisive of political protest, suggesting that effective resistance can only be offered by individuals, each acting alone” (487). “ (Connors, 10).
• 1991: Murray publishes The Craft of Revision

  • Donald Murray The Craft of Revision. (chapter 1, page 5) “This book is different because the author is still learning to write. Each page reflects what I am learning as I write and rewrite this textbook. Write along with me. Try your own experiments in meaning, use your language to explore your world as I use my language to explore my world. It is all a matter of trial and instructive error. I try to say what I cannot say and fail but find failure instructive. It shows me another way to attempt to say what I have not before said. Fail with me. (Murray, 5)”
  • Focus is on failure together, not one right answer but a collective attempt at shaping and approaching knowledge. That is his heart at the core of “expressivism.”

  Robert Connors seeks to reframe Murray from an Expressivist to a Reformer (Writing process theorists) 

  • “In the minds of these teachers, the problem with composition-rhetoric went deeper than mere issues of content, and the received methods of teaching writing were not merely inefficient or unworkable. The way in which composition was taught, to these theorists, was at best a bad method. At worst, it was actively destructive, leading to desiccation of the student’s creativity, to useless fear about meaningless (and probably fictional) entities such as Emphasis and The Paragraph or Comparison and Contrast, to writer’s block, paranoia about mechanical issues, and to dead, imitative, ponderous student prose that attempted to mimic the dead, imitative, ponderous prose of academia. (Connors, 16)” – Robert Connors Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy,
• 2014: Peter Elbow redefines, and delineates personal writing and expressivism

  • Personal writing:
    • Personal writing is actually used more commonly than realized, especially by good writers
    • Elbow cites Anne Herrington who says. “Failing to recognize the presence of [linguistic] rendering [of personal experience] in some academic writing—including writing within composition studies—contributes to dismissing its value in undergraduate writing” (Herrington, p. 233).

  • Elbow also cites Jane Hindman who thinks with her experience—noticing one feeling and then probing and waiting to find another feeling underneath it—in order to wrestle with the abstract nonpersonal issue of the degree to which the self is constructed by discourse. (Hindman, 88-108).

  • Problem with labels and delineating
    • “When people fail to notice that a single term is hiding multiple meanings, they often think carelessly and argue fruitlessly past each other: they are unconsciously assuming different definitions of personal writing, voice, or academic discourse.” (Elbow)
    • “When teachers or other readers take enough care to notice, for example, the differences between personal elements among the three dimensions of writing, they also have a better chance of attending to their own personal reactions and engaging in careful thinking:” (Elbow,)
    • Even the way that he writes this is very thorough and contemplative. He does not pass over or assume anything of his readers. He also doesn’t battle straw men, but intentionally defines everything. 

  • His own definitions and relabeling
    • “ Still, any attempt I might make to hide behind impersonal writing was probably wasted on many readers, since I have come to be so widely identified with personal writing. In the early 1980s, Berlin defined me as a prime expressivist, and this characterization was widely accepted. So it’s not really possible for me to pretend to be disinterested.” (Elbow)
    • “expressivism” is a seriously misleading word. It has led countless people to skewed and oversimplified assumptions about a period and a group of people—for I think that what I’m saying here goes for Macrorie, Britton, and Murray too. I’d say that all of us defended and even celebrated personal writing in a school context where it had been neglected or even banned. But we didn’t call personal writing any better than nonpersonal writing. Unfortunately, the term expressivism has been sold and widely bought as a label for the essence of my work—and that of a whole school of others—allegedly preaching that students should always use personal language and thinking and take the self as the topic of their writing—and not consult any standard of truth but what they find inside.” (Elbow)
    • “Of course Britton pointed out that “expressive language” shouldn’t be neglected in school over “transactional” and “poetic” language; Kinneavey spoke of “expressive discourse” as one of four kinds. But neither of them or any of the others, as far as I know, ever used the term as a label for people. They wouldn’t have spoken of a teacher or method as “expressive” or “expressivist.” As far as I can tell, the term “expressivist” was coined and used only by people who wanted a word for people they disapproved of and wanted to discredit.” (Elbow)
    • “Summing up the two parts of this essay, I see the two terms, “personal writing” and “expressivism,” suffering from different problems. “Personal writing,” as a single term, tempts one to assume that there’s a single kind of writing that can be so described—instead of recognizing how the personal and the nonpersonal are often mixed across three dimensions. I’m afraid that “expressivism” is hopelessly infected by narrow and usually pejorative connotations. I don’t see any way to use the term validly. Historians of composition need to find more accurate ways of describing the views of the people it was pinned on.” (Elbow)
• 2014: WAC Liz Bryant Purdue University

  • Liz continues to promote Expressivist theory through a “yes and..” approach
    • “composition scholarship leads us to believe that we “are” one or the other. In our scholarship one cannot “be” both/and because the significant scholars in our field have said that a social epistemic view of writing precludes an Expressive and Cognitive view of writing (pg 3)
    • “The problem with accomplishing this is that academia has been built on one-upmanship: if my theory is going to be given any credit, I have to trash the ones before me.” (4). 
• 2023: Michaud attempts to reform our perspective 

  • “While we cannot, of course, blame Berlin entirely for the marginalization that led to the establishment of the conceptual frame Donald Murray = Expressivist, we can investigate the ways in which the frame he helped create has been taken up and re-inscribed, largely without question or qualification, by subsequent scholars and historians of the discipline. In what follows, I examine one such instance, to better understand the way the frame has been activated and to investigate whether it stands up in the face of a more nuanced reading of Murray’s work.” (Michaud, 11). 

So What Do I do With this??

• I really Like Liz Bryant’s perspective.
  • “The theories build to give us more insight into what humans do as they compose and what teachers do to build writers. Our theories build; they are not trash. And each time a theory is added, our pie gets larger and larger with many more slices for everyone when they need it.”
• When theories are in competition we are left with a limited, and polarized perspective of knowledge. By understanding the conversation I become better equipped to participate in it. 
• In future research I would love to consider the idea of production. Rather than only focusing on the process writing (which tends to be the issue of the expressivist) or just the product (which tends to be the problem of institutional structure), I’d want to take both Bryant and Elbow’s advice to look at the “yes and” of production.
• Expressivism in itself is not enough. The answer cannot only be found within. Rather by understanding the value of the personal perspective we gain a unique value of our writers, and remind ourselves of the importance of valuing people above all else. 

Resources

Bryant, Liz. “Preface: Yes I know that Expressivism is out of Vogue, But…” Critical Expressivism Theory and Practice in The Composition Classroom. 2014. Perspectives of writing, Editors: Tara Roeder, and Roseanne Gatto. https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2014.0575.1.1

Berlin, James. Rhetoric and ideology in the writing class. College English. 1988. Pages 477-494.

Conners, Robert. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. University of Pittsburgh Press. 1997. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5hjt92

Herrington, Anne. “Gone fishin’: Rendering and the uses of personal experience in writing.” In P. Belanoff, M. Dickson, S. I. Fontaine, & C. Moran (Eds.), Writing with Elbow. Utah State University Press. 2002. Pages 223-238.

Hindman, Jane. Making writing matter: Using “the personal” to recover[y] an essential[ist] tension in academic discourse. College English. 2001. 64(1), 88-108.

Michaud, Michael. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Donald Murray: From Expressivist To Reformer.” A Writer Reforms the Teaching of Writing. Editors: Rich Rice, Heather MacNeill Falconer, and J. Michael Rifenburg. Consulting Editor: Susan H. McLeod | Associate Editor: Olivia Johnson. University Press of Colorado. 2023. Reform.pdf 

Murray, Donald. Craft of Revision. 1991.