As I’ve been working through an online certificate in project management, I’ve been thinking a lot about how what I do as a teacher, as a writer, and as a technologist is a form of project management. Can writing studies persist in a world where the humanities are less valued, and where AI is making writing something you can just…generate with a prompt? Might naming writing and research in different ways help the humanities survive?
Don Murray’s short 1972 article for Leaflet, “Teach Writing as a Process not Product,” inaugurated many of the fundamental approaches to writing and the teaching of writing that we use today, whether consciously or not. He argued that we should not approach the act—and the teaching—of writing as a product, as a final, polished essay, because such approaches can cause young writers to become intensely anxious about writing. Think of the page that is dripping with red ink—treating the student essay as if it were a finished, perfected document that we then pick apart to improve understanding, as more advanced readers and writers would a novel by Austen or a poem by Eliot. Instead, we should teach “the process of discovery through language”: “It is the process of exploration of what we know and what we feel about what we know through language. It is the process of using language to learn about our world, to evaluate what we learn about our world, to communicate what we learn about our world.”
Murray divided the writing process into three stages or steps: prewriting, writing, and rewriting. Each stage depends on building from the last, and we don’t always work through these stages one time, from beginning, middle, to end. Instead, each stage is iterative and dynamic.
Murray divided the writing process into three stages or steps: prewriting, writing, and rewriting. Each stage depends on building from the last, and we don’t always work through these stages one time, from beginning, middle, to end. Instead, each stage is iterative and dynamic. More contemporary approaches to the writing process, like that described in Teaching Academic Writing: A Toolkit for Higher Education (2003), see it as even more recursive:
In this writing process, we as teachers try to focus on the student, be patient, and allow discovery to happen. We have to “respect the student, not for [their writing] product, not for the paper we call literature by giving it a grade, but the search for truth in which [they] are engaged.” Murray even refers to the teacher as less a “teacher” and more of a “developer.”
This writing process in many ways resembles the Agile approach to software development and other business processes.
This writing process in many ways resembles the Agile approach to software development and other business processes. The Agile approach to software development processes began in the 1990s as a partial response to the more linear, fixed, traditional approaches to project management, like Watefall. Where Waterfall focused on delivering a final, pre-negotiated product along a fixed timeline, Agile sought to enable a more iterative, flexible, dynamic approach to project development that engaged the customer as a a collaborator. Partial components of the overall project would be delivered more quickly (in “sprints”) to gain feedback from the client earlier, and thereby delivering what the client really wants, as opposed to what was simply negotiated before the project had even begun. While Agile project management was at first exclusive to the software development community, it soon spread to all kinds of projects in all domains of activity.
Might there be benefits to thinking of the writing process as an Agile process? The act of writing as a form of project management?
The obvious problem with seeing the writing process as an Agile project is that readers aren’t exactly customers or clients, especially when it comes to getting your ideas across in a clear and effective manner. And, despite the fact that others are involved, the team in a writing project is very small, usually. But every act of reading is a negotiation, and the reader who understands is the reader who buys your argument. What if we think of the student as a team member, with readers as their end customers, involved through the writing process in the act of figuring out what the customer really wants? What the customer perhaps doesn’t even know they want, at the outset?
Agile development values these four fundamental aspects of project management:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
There are several principles that go along with these overall values, but the gist of it is valuing true collaboration, getting feedback early and often, and iterating with that feedback to delivering something that satisfies the client, in the end. Change should not be seen as an enemy, but rather a partner, because it can lead to even better solutions.
While it is very unlikely that any given first-year composition instructor comes from a background of Agile project management, it is actually highly likely that our students will be entering into this discourse, in some measure or form. In 2019-2020, almost 25% of all bachelors’ degrees were awarded in business and computer science. And while writers aren’t serving, in any exact way, a customer, it is very true that readers—even the teacher of writing, who is perhaps the first reader—must be able to grasp the author’s perspective clearly. To this end, precise, organized, compelling writing that takes audience and context into consideration is not only important; it is also the currency that determines success.
The idea of an Agile writing process may be useful for students and instructors, for whom naming a threshold concept helps to understand it (see Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies). Such an approach to writing values the act of writing in stages, of supplying the reader with early drafts, of seeking feedback that tests whether the draft is reading or functioning as we expect, of iterating and revising, and so on. However, as a teacher of writing for over 15 years, it is rare that students take this approach to heart. Helping students give names to what they do and how they do it in the writing and research classroom also helps students connect those experiences with the world outside the classroom.
Helping students give names to what they do and how they do it in the writing and research classroom also helps students connect those experiences with the world outside the classroom.
As those of us who teach writing know, artificial intelligence as a tool for writing is only going to get better, and it is only going to become more central in the writing that is produced in many different domains. We might liken this to no-code options for web development or data analysis and visualization. And yet, we are also living in an era that increasingly sees higher education as transactional. Writing had been for many years been the province of the humanities broadly understood; as those methodologies and principles and values dwindle, so too do writing and thought. We cannot go back. How can we go forward? Even if we include Communication in the Humanities, fewer than 1 in 10 college graduates of 2020 graduated with Humanities degrees (Barshay, 2021). However, the need for clear, innovative, novel ideas will not go away—and AI built on Large Language Models cannot think something that hasn’t been thought before (Browning and Lecun, 2022). We have a real conundrum on our hands.
Writing had been for many years been the province of the humanities broadly understood; as those methodologies and principles and values dwindle, so too do writing and thought. We cannot go back. How can we go forward?
There may be multiple benefits to explicitly using the discourse not only of project management, but explicitly of Agile project management, when it comes to the teaching of writing. Managing a substantial writing project as a student in some limited ways demands the skills of project management. This is a discourse that students will encounter in other courses they’re taking, and, given that business is the most popular degree in higher education today, it is likely that they will encounter it in their professional lives, as well. By doing so, we can use language that is known, for a process that is increasingly unfamiliar and yet necessary; we can also help combat the somewhat pernicious idea that creativity sprang fully formed from the professional disciplines. This “Agile” approach to writing in fact began in the 1970s. Perhaps seeding the language of Agile with the processes and principles of the Humanities, we can inject creativity and humanism into the professional vocabularies of the next generation.
Tonya Howe 