An aerial photograph of "the writing process" as seen by many school and college teachers around 1980. The model, which cites scholarship for each of the nodes in the process of writing and the teaching of writing, appeared as the appendix to Jane Zeni Flinn's "Teacher-tested research on writing." Flinn's piece is the last essay in her edited collection Reflections on Writing: Programs and Strategies from Classrooms K-12, a mimeographed volume produced in 1981 by the English Department at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Although the isolation of the steps in the writing process had already been challenged, indeed by some of the scholarship cited in this model/bibliography, Flinn's essay follows the chart and omits any suggestion of nonlinearity or recursiveness.

The "Gateway Writing Project," mentioned at the bottom and co-directed by Flinn, was the St. Louis branch of the National Writing Project and therefore would trace its genealogy back to James Gray's founding Bay Area Writing Project (hence the attributions of "BAWP" and "GWP"). This helps explain why many of citations in the model would have been more familiar to school teachers than to college teachers. Some references less easy to trace are Haim G. Ginott, Teacher and Child: A Book for Parents and Teachers (1972); Carl H. Klaus, Composing Childhood Experience: An Approach to Writing and Learning in the Elementary Grades (1979); Kenneth Koch, Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (1970); Roger Landrum, A Day Dream I Had at Night and Other Stories: Teaching Children to Make Their Own Readers (1971); Frank Smith, Writing and the Writer (1981); Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theatre: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques (1973); Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism (1973), Jacque Wuertenberg; Helping Children to Become Writers (1980). CompPile should be sufficient to find the others. Or you can go to Flinn's own bibliography, available along with this diagram and the rest of the edited collection, at ERIC Document Reproduction Service, ED 262 421. It's all indexed in CompPile.

The same year the co-author of the diagram, Judith Shook, published a note in Research in the Teaching of English with data arguing that the students of St. Louis school teachers who had attended the Gateway Writing Project's summer workshop subsequently gained more in their writing skills than did students of teachers who had not attended ("The Gateway Writing Project: An Evaluation of Teachers Teaching Teachers to Write," Volume 15, No. 3, 1981, pp. 282-284). Shook doesn't say whether the Gateway Writing Project teachers had read all the works cited in her and Flinn's diagram.

RH, May 2004