Composing Responses to Literary Texts: A Process Approach

Abstract

Teachers of literature who recognize that writing is a mode of discovery as well as a mode of communication are beginning to make use of informal or exploratory writing in their classes. In his essay, From Story to Essay: Reading and Writing, for instance, Anthony Petrosky illustrates the usefulness of response statements in a graduate seminar on reading and psychology which he taught at the University of Pittsburgh. He argues that having students write about their initial impressions allows them to make links between their reading and their own experience. Students become active participants in the creation of meaning. They compose their understandings of texts, and their compositions become indicators of their level of comprehension.' In their enthusiasm to introduce students to the uses of exploratory writing, however, teachers sometimes forget that response statements are means to an end rather than ends in themselves. Response is only the initial stage in a complex process. Teachers who are interested in having students revise their initial impressions of texts into finished essays need to be aware not only of the usefulness of exploratory writing, but also of ways in which exploratory writing can be transformed into writing which makes sense to an audience. They need to understand the nature of the process of responding to literary texts, a process, quite obviously, which involves reading as well as writing. Research on the nature of the composing process is helpful in elucidating the broad outlines of the process of responding to literature. James Britton and Linda Flower describe the pattern of change which frequently occurs as writers move from expressive writing, to use Britton's term, or from writing, to use Flower's term, toward essays which communicate ideas to an audience.2 Writers initially write to and for themselves, and so early drafts of essays are frequently characterized by an absence of statements showing causal relations, citation of evidence, or development of ideas. Expressive or writer-based writing is writing close to the self, writing