Donald Murray: Expressivist or Pragmatist?

Tony Filpi affirms, in his presentation on theorist, author, and teacher Donald K. Murray that Murray’s main aim was to “improve the teaching of composition to pre-university students,” and that, though Murray was often labeled an expressivist, “focusing more on writers and the experience of writing than on the final text” (Smith, 220), he was really a pragmatist at heart.

Filpi supports his claims by giving his audience a thorough background on Murray’s early years. The theorist dropped out of school not once, but twice because he felt the teaching practices were “too rigid.” But, Filpi reveals, it was Murray’s ambition as a writer and his aspirations to a “middle-class” lifestyle that took him back where he was able to “[finish] high school and college at the same time.” Not surprisingly, Murray developed an interest in the way composition was taught in public schools and wrote his seminal works (Writer Teaches Writing and The Craft of Revision) with public school teachers in mind. He used direct feedback from these instructors to rewrite and revise his work until he received their approval and support.
Murray adhered to the theory that “the best teachers of writing are writers” and cultivated his pedagogy around the view that “writing is product driven but process oriented,” but he also believed in vision and the element of “surprise,” as “Murray [claimed] that often he [did] not know where his writing [would] take him” (Smith, 223).

According to Filpi, Murray’s theory was a somewhat more realistic version of Peter Elbow’s theory of reflection (with freewriting at its center) in which the writer must think first about the product before sitting down to write. Murray’s theory broke down into three process stages:

• 
  Pre-vision – Pre-writing and a practice of delay and rehearsal. He believed there were eight “signals” a writer might receive when the visioning process was complete and it became clear that it was time to write. This could include the revelation of a genre, a POV, or a voice among other things.
• Vision – the development of order (sequence) and meaning suggested by the pre-vision signal to write
• Re-vision – which discovers language and voice and flow through editing and proofreading.
  

According to Filpi and to Smith, et al in Compbiblio: Leaders and Influences in Composition Theory and Practice, Murray “is probably most remembered for being the youngest journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize” in 1954 (220).But, his legacy might center more around an approachable pedagogy, even for pre-university students, including the charge that writers are also readers and ought to “remain open to the lessons that their [own] writing will reveal to them” (Smith, 223).