The writing process is something that has been studied for many years but no one can seem to “crack the code.” One study that studied such was Carol Berkenkotter’s “Decisions and Revisions: The Planning Strategies of a Publishing Writer.” The study by Berkenkotter conducted on Professor Donald Murray was used, “to learn more about the planning and revising strategies of a highly skilled and verbal writer, to discover how these strategies could be most usefully analyzed, and to determine how an understanding of this writers process would contribute to what we have already discovered about how skilled writers plan and revise” (Berkenkotter p. 158). There were three different stages of the study: 1) have Murray record his think-aloud process wherever he was doing work, 2) Murray would record his think-aloud process again except only for an hour and Berkenkotter provided a specific audience and purpose with the task given, 3) Berkenkotter observed Murray’s think-aloud protocol while he revised a professional journal article while in his home with no time limit.
They found that Murray’s process shows the decisions and editing, no matter how big or small, that actually go into planning the work. Murray seems to jump around from each of the steps of editing, reviewing, drafting, etc., and does not follow any specific order. The most unfavorable stage of the study was the second in which Murray was given one hour to work on a task that had a specific audience and subject. It was clear putting the writer in an unfamiliar place to write on a subject he had no expertise in and for a limited amount of time would not work in anyone’s favor. Although this study gives a little more insight into the writing process, it is safe to say there are still many studies that would need to be conducted to even get close to determining how it works. I think it would be interesting to see studies of the writing process of well-known authors so we could get a look into how they create and process their work.
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