Composition Forum 40 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Donald Murray: Revisiting A Writer Teaches Writing at 50

Oct 15, 2026

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Retrospective essay revisiting Donald Murray’s A Writer Teaches Writing, marking its fiftieth anniversary, and reassessing Murray’s legacy in composition and rhetoric. The author argues that reducing Murray to an Expressivist frame limits recognition of Murray’s broader contributions to the field’s disciplinary ethos. It positions AWTW as an artifact of past writing pedagogy, highlighting its 1960s historical context and its reformist aim of reshaping teaching practices.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages8

Reading Time12 min

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Composition Forum 40, Fall 2018

What We Talk About When We Talk About Donald Murray: Revisiting A Writer Teaches Writing at 50

Abstract

A Historical Context for Revisiting AWTW

Current Issue From the Editors Weblog Editorial Board Editorial Policy Submissions Archives Accessibility Search Composition Forum 40, Fall 2018 What We Talk About When We Talk About Donald Murray: Revisiting A Writer Teaches Writing at 50 Michael Michaud Abstract: In this Retrospective I revisit Donald Murray’s A Writer Teaches Writing, fifty years old this year, and argue for a reconsideration of Murray’s legacy within composition and rhetoric by claiming that the frame with which scholars and teachers of writing have tended to understand Murray (i.e. Donald Murray = Expressivist) is limiting and fails to do justice to Murray’s broader contributions to the field’s disciplinary ethos. If you’re like many teachers and scholars of composition and rhetoric trained after the year 1990... 2000... or 2010... Donald Murray is a name you likely know, but probably not particularly well. You may have met Murray on the page in graduate school—probably you read his canonical “Teach Writing as Process Not Product” in CrossTalk, maybe you skimmed “When Writer’s Block Isn’t” in The Norton Book of Composition Studies, perhaps you taught “All Writing is Autobiography” while experimenting with the Writing About Writing pedagogy. Odds are good, though, that if you have read Murray at all, you haven’t read him much, and that if you haven’t read him much you haven’t read any of his books, including A Writer Teaches Writing (AWTW), his first book of writing about writing{1} , published fifty years ago this year. There are a number of reasons, beyond the fact of the book’s anniversary, to read (or reread) AWTW. My goal here is introduce (or reintroduce) the book to scholars and teachers of composition and rhetoric and to persuade them, to persuade you, of the book’s ongoing significance to our field. While it’s possible to revisit AWTW for its pedagogical utility, I suggest readers approach the book mostly as an artifact of our disciplinary past. Published in 1968, four years before Janet Emig’s seminal The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, AWTW sheds light on an important and sometimes-neglected period in our field’s history, the pre-writing process years of 1964-1970 (see Fleming, 2011) . The book illustrates how many of the innovative pedagogical strategies and approaches to writing pedagogy that came to be taken as gospel in the 1970sand 1980s were already in place in some quarters pre-1971 . Revisiting AWTW also reminds readers of composition and rhetoric’s sometimes forgotten roots in English Education (see Stock, 2011) . Murray spent two years collaborating with a group of high school English teachers to write the book and it was written largely to persuade school teachers to change not just the way they teach writing, but the way they teach, period. Which brings me to a third and final reason to revisit AWTW on its anniversary year. Regardless of the extent of your exposure to Murray and his work, there’s a good chance that what you talk about when you talk about Donald Murray looks something like this: Donald Murray = Expressivist I won’t argue that this frame is wrong{2} , but there are other conceptual frames we can use to talk about Murray, and when we read or reread the first edition of AWTW, these become evident. The fact is, via AWTWand other early publications, at a critical moment in our field’s disciplinary development, Murray helped establish key beliefs and values about teaching and learning that shape our work down to the present day. If we are a field that invites and celebrates diversity, is committed to equity and social justice, works to provide greater educational access to all who seek it, and takes as a central element of our work the empowerment of all learners, this is due to the work of early teacher/scholars like Murray who, through books like AWTW, helped instill in writing teachers and researchers the humane, ethical, and reformist ethos to which we still adhere. In short, if reader

FAQs

What is the main argument about Donald Murray’s legacy?

The essay argues that understanding Murray mainly as an Expressivist is limiting and does not fully reflect his wider contributions to composition and rhetoric.

Why revisit A Writer Teaches Writing at its fiftieth anniversary?

The author revisits the book to show its ongoing significance, framing it as an artifact of the field’s disciplinary past and as evidence of early writing-pedagogy innovations.

How is A Writer Teaches Writing positioned historically in the essay?

It is situated in the 1964–1970 pre-writing process years, published in 1968 before later widely accepted strategies of the 1970s and 1980s.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by jay