A naturalistic experiment was conducted and written about in Carol Berkenkotter’s “Decisions and Revisions: The Strategies of a Publishing Writer” and Donald Murray’s “Response of a Laboratory Rat—or, Being Protocoled.” Berkenkotter decided to do an experiment on Murray where he records his writing process and thinks “out loud” to see how a writer plans, writes, revises, and edits. She states that studies like this have been done on writers before, but in a specific setting where people watch you for an hour, which obviously wouldn’t have the most accurate results. If someone told me to write and think out loud in front of them, I’d definitely be overthinking everything, and it wouldn’t come out naturally. I found this experiment interesting because I didn’t even know these things existed and had been performed by writers.
They concluded that Murray spends most of his time planning his writing before anything else, but he says that’s his way of revising. He also has readers read his articles before sending them out to the editor. In Murray’s article, he described this experiment as natural and something he learned from. He even said that he and the researcher have become good colleagues. He expressed his disdain for the one-hour laboratory setting, his natural hours, and the office space. From these articles, I learned that everyone has their own writing process. Although mine is in the same order as Murray’s, I spend most of my time editing. I don’t revise much at all because I usually like what I write (which I want to change). It is only when someone else reads my work and comments on something that could be changed that I revise it.
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