individual process

Something that's been bothering me about this whole "process" question is, as most of you know by now, how to grade the product.

I've been taking in all the readings, trying to learn from them and see what makes sense and what's realistic. And I realize, I still am not sure what the final product should look like. We've talked about process, and today in class I tried to speculate on which parts of the process are productive and which are not. "Composition" doesn't always have to equal writing, I get that. But, I mean... the eventual point is writing, right? Maybe I just need to be a little more patient. This is all still relatively new to me.
What jumped out at me about the readings was just how much process can differ between individuals. For example, I already knew that there were differences in the way that men and women approach situations in life, but for some reason it didn't occur to me that they might approach writing differently, as demonstrated in Flynn's essay.
Murray's essay about writing as autobiography was also rather intriguing. My favorite writing that I do is my fiction writing, but among my friends I often refer to it, half-jokingly, as, "my life with all the names changed." In that case, I could absolutely agree that writing is autobiography. But that's a very particular kind of writing. When the writing is personal in any way, whether it be poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or anything where the author gets to choose the course of the piece, I can see an argument for autobiography. This could even happen in research papers, to a certain extent, but in that case I feel like what Murray is describing sounds a lot like the way that we've been defining "voice." It's like the author's personal way of phrasing, or the lens through which they see the world and then describe it in their writing.

With all of that in mind, I come back to the question of grading. I suppose this is why I like the idea of grading steps within the process. It helps to know where the product came from, and it helps the student to see at which point he or she went wrong.