WRITING AS PROCESS AND WRITING AS PRODUCT

Writing is both human labor and the product of that labor.

Donald Murray's dictum to "Teach writing as process not product" is one of composition's foundational precepts, and much of our pedagogy centers around understanding how people write. Our presence at this conference reminds us that information is the result of human labor.

 

There are parallels between open source software development and the writing process.

Linux developer Linus Torvalds offers the dictum "Release early, release often." Similarly, we ask our students to freewrite, to compose a zero draft, to first just get their ideas down on paper, to do another draft, to revise, to publish their writing in class magazines and websites, to comment on one another's writing, and so on.

 

Writing's relationship to the commons affects the circuit of writing within the writing process.

John Trimbur suggests that "although student writing does indeed circulate and take on the symbolic exchange value of academic credit, the directions 'trade papers with a partner' [. . .] indicate the limits of the circuit in the intimate spaces of the classroom" (195). This small circuit, however, is a part of the writing process, prior to its reification as a product. The grade on a scarce and solely owned paper says to the student ne plus ultra: beyond this, nothing. However, the release of a work into the shared intellectual commons -- under, perhaps, a Creative Commons license permitting the sharing and authoring of derivative works as long as the student author is acknowledged -- can forestall the ultimate reification of writing-as-product (see Jacques Derrida on writing sous rature and the via rupta; Roland Barthes on the fluidity and fixity of work and text) and locate the writing as always in process, so that its value in the commons becomes simultaneously zero and infinite, and thereby no longer scarce and perhaps more true to its nature as non-rivalrous information good.

Introduction: turnitin dot com

1. Writing as Process and Writing as Product

2. Neoclassical Economics and Marxian Economics

3. Market Transactions and Gift Transactions

4. Use Value and Exchange Value

Conclusion: sharingwriting dot net

Writing is both human labor and the product of that labor.

There are parallels between open source software development and the writing process.

Writing's relationship to the commons affects the circuit of writing within the writing process.

Seeing writing as a scarce product problematically shapes teachers' perceptions of students.

The concerns of quantification can themselves commodify students' labor.