Composition Forum 52, Fall 2023
http://compositionforum.com/issue/52/

Janet Emig’s “Composing Aloud” Method: Reflecting on a Fifty-Year Legacy

Paul Butler, Lea Colchado-Joaquin, Rand Khalil, Ann O’Bryan, Dalel Serda, Virginia Mixon Swindell[1]

Abstract: Janet Emig’s The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders—often cited as one of the most important works in the history of Composition Studies—describes a unique practice, “composing aloud,” in which writers audibly speak words while simultaneously deciding how and where they fit within sentences. Emig’s articulation of “composing aloud” remains largely unexamined in the fifty-plus years of subsequent scholarship. Reflecting on Emig’s pioneering study, the authors discuss various ways “composing aloud” occurs in the writing process across settings as varied as classrooms, writing centers, and communities, and within composition theories as cutting-edge as embodied rhetorics and Chicane oral storytelling.

Just over fifty years ago, the National Council of Teachers of English published Janet Emig’s The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, considered by Stephen North “arguably… the most influential piece of Researcher inquiry—and maybe any kind of inquiry—in Composition’s short history” (197). Appearing in 1971, the small but groundbreaking volume diverged from the composition research preceding it in two significant ways: by investigating the writing process, rather than the written product, and by using case study, a method that had been recommended by the editors of Research in Written Composition but had not yet been used in Composition Studies.

In her study, Emig sets out to explore, as the title describes, the composing processes of twelfth graders. In the introduction to the text, Earl Buxton claims that Emig is working in uncharted territory because up to this point, researchers had only studied writing as a product and not as a process which is, ultimately, Emig’s focus (v). Through her study, Emig concludes that the twelfth graders who participated in her case studies had far more experience writing what she decides to term “extensive writing” versus what she names “reflexive writing” (91). Extensive writing refers to teacher-initiated writing, or what we might more contemporarily call “academic writing” and what we tend to perceive as more traditionally “objective.” In contrast, reflexive writing, according to Emig, is self-initiated and is what we might now describe as subjective, “personal writing” and, notably, is not restricted by time and context. According to Emig’s conclusions, extensive, or school-based, writing is, alternatively to reflexive writing, influenced by time and context. On average, with her participants, extensive writing elicits less planning and revision than reflexive writing does (99). From her group of participants, student writers produce extensive writing for the teacher but do not, interestingly or necessarily, consider them an audience.

One of Emig’s lasting contributions is her description—or, in the words of Richard L. Larson, “tentative model”—of the composing process. In a review of her text, Larson succinctly distills the steps of the process outlined by Emig, including “composing aloud”:

She suggests that the composing process… can be usefully analyzed into ten parts: the “context” in which composing occurs; the nature of the stimulus to composing; prewriting activities; planning; starting; composing aloud (the ongoing activity of uttering words one after another—words that become part of the written piece and words that are part of the process by which the writer decides what to say where); reformulation of phrases and sentences tentatively set down; stopping; the contemplation of the written piece; the influence of teachers on the piece. (137)

In addition to innovatively focusing on the writing process, Emig pioneered the use of the case study methodology in Composition Studies, which, in conjunction with colleagues June Birnbaum and Douglas Fish, she defines as “an empirical study that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context” (192). In line with her work in Composing Processes, Emig and her co-authors assert that “the case or cases being studied are fixed in time and place and have identifiable confines such as a program, an event, an activity, or an individual” (192). Case study has become standard in the field but many forget, as Gerald Nelms reminds us, that Emig’s effort effectively represented the first attempt to deploy the methodology in rhetoric and composition (125).

Emig’s study examines the writing of eight twelfth graders from Chicago, mostly selected by their schools’ English department chairpersons and considered “average” or “above-average” academically (29). She observed each student’s writing in four face-to-face sessions, in which she asked the students to “compose aloud” while producing an essay in response to her prompt, tape recording the sessions for later use (29-30). She also reviewed past writing samples they provided as well as their academic records (29-30). Emig showcases Lynn, one of the students who seems to share some traits of her fellow research peers, but also has some traits which seem to be exceptional. For example, Lynn, the daughter of a lawyer father and history teacher mother, is in the top five percent of her academic class, takes advanced placement courses, and Emig states that Lynn’s schedule “closely resembles the schedule of a college freshman” (45). Fifty years later, with the added benefit of the multiple case studies that have occurred in the decades since Emig wrote, we can recognize the limitations of a research project focused so heavily on a single, exceptional student. Nonetheless, the field could never have refined the case study methodology without Emig’s remarkably innovative efforts.

Yet, in addition to Emig’s enduring contributions with respect to the writing process and case study, her work provides another legacy: the articulation of the “composing aloud” concept.

As we discussed the fiftieth anniversary of Emig’s landmark book in our graduate research seminar, we found ourselves returning frequently to the innovative aspects of composing aloud, a technique Emig used to observe her subjects engage in the composing process. As Nelms points out, it was this method, generally cited less frequently than other features of Emig’s book, that prompted future researchers to study writers’ cognitive behaviors in even greater detail (108). Flower and Hayes’ think-aloud protocols come to mind as one noteworthy development. In reassessing Emig’s text, Ralph Voss acknowledges the contribution of Emig’s composing aloud focus and similar studies to increased understanding of the composing process:

Emig’s own delineation of ten “dimensions of the composing process,” and such further formulations as John R. Hayes’ and Linda Flower’s “Cognitive Process of Writing,” have given us much more general understanding of the essentially vitalistic business of how human beings write. This general understanding can, increasingly does, and ought to inform our pedagogical priorities. (282)

In our own discussions, we noticed that, because Emig’s students did not compose aloud when writing outside of her study, but only at the author’s request during research sessions, composing aloud as formulated by Emig was primarily a research construct, a tool she used to observe her subjects’ actual composition process by having them make their thoughts audible while they created a written text. But given Emig’s description of the “composing aloud” practice by students in her study, we wondered if, where, and how “composing aloud” might occur in the writing process outside of an experimental setting. Considering Emig’s unique and largely unexamined formulation of “composing aloud,” these questions emerged: Where does “composing aloud” stand today, fifty years after Emig defined it? What remains of Emig’s method in Composition Studies? How has it evolved in disciplinary research and practice? To what extent does the field remain indebted to composing aloud, even if we do not regularly or explicitly acknowledge its role?

As we began our investigation, we recognized that while Emig used composing aloud as a research method, she also reported detailed observations and analysis of her subjects’ composing-aloud practices, which adds another layer to her contribution. As Emig noticed:

Composing aloud does not occur in a solid series of composing behaviors. Rather, many kinds of hesitation behaviors intervene . . . making filler sounds; making critical comments; expressing feelings and attitudes . . . engaging in digressions…. Even the student writer’s silence can be categorized: the silence can be filled with physical writing (sheer scribal activity); with reading; or the silence can be seemingly “unfilled”—“seemingly” because the writer may at these times be engaged in very important nonexternalized thinking and composing. (42)

Just as case study itself has methodological challenges, composing aloud as a research construct is by no means perfect, of course; students who take part in the process because instructed to by a professional observer are not likely to externalize all thoughts. Nor, in all likelihood, does a student’s “compose aloud” practice in a research setting reveal their “natural” writing process; on the contrary, it is somewhat artificial. Despite these limitations, Emig’s use of composing aloud as a research method and detailed observations of its practice have significant implications for further research and instruction in Composition Studies.

With this in mind, we decided to examine how each member of our seminar has discovered “composing aloud” as a strategy in various facets of our research and pedagogy. What follows are our reflections on how Emig’s technique continues to influence everyday disciplinary activities, organized in individual narratives about our experiences. Hence, an MA English student reconceives everyday tutoring practices in the writing center; a full-time community college instructor and Rhetoric, Composition, and Pedagogy (RCP) graduate student investigates innovative ways to engage co-requisite, or basic, writers; a second RCP doctoral student reshapes pre-writing activities through “gritty” classroom dialogue; a PhD student in literary studies experiments with embodied rhetoric to reawaken students’ love of writing; a third RCP PhD candidate revalues oral storytelling in the Chicane community to open new rhetorical spaces; and an RCP professor connects Emig’s oft-taught text to inventive collaborative composing with first-year writers.

Composing Aloud in the Writing Center

—Virginia Mixon Swindell, MA English student and writing center consultant

Although Emig articulates and defines “composing aloud” as a research method, as a way to externalize her subjects’ writing process for her observation and study, the “composing aloud” practice she describes also has potential to serve students as a writing improvement strategy. Speak-aloud protocols were used as a pedagogic practice even before Emig’s study; she cites earlier articles that discuss the use of speech with adolescent writing as “systematic group interventions” designed to change student behavior (21). As Emig notes, these studies differ from hers because they are “efforts to instruct or teach” rather than “efforts to describe” (21). However, even though the use of speech in writing instruction occurs before Emig’s work, her detailed observations about her students’ “compose aloud” behaviors amplify their value as an instructional tool. For example, Emig observes that, while composing aloud, her students express feelings and ask questions, a finding that suggests student writers may benefit from composing aloud in dialogue with an active listener. In my experience as a university writing center peer consultant, I have observed students become more comfortable with the writing process, and improve the quality of their composition products, through just such a “composing aloud” dialogue.

At our university, writing center peer consultants typically meet one-on-one with undergraduate and graduate student writers across the disciplines, at the students’ own initiative or at their professors’ directive, for thirty-minute to one-hour coaching sessions in which the consultant and student discuss and review a specific piece of writing. Consultants are trained to serve students as a non-directive active listener, prompting their thinking about writing with questions, rather than proposing specific revisions to their work. Reading drafts aloud is embedded in the standard writing center consultation. We begin sessions by asking the student to read their draft aloud, or, if they prefer, we will read it aloud to them. My experience in these sessions suggests significant ways composing aloud is a helpful tool for these students.

Students come to the writing center at all stages of the composing process discussed by Emig: from prewriting, planning, and starting to reformulating and contemplating their product (34-35). In some sessions, the student has nothing more than an assignment prompt and a vague idea. These students seek help brainstorming, clarifying a thesis, developing an argument, creating an outline, organizing their ideas, or otherwise getting started. As a consultant, I prompt these writers’ thought processes with questions, such as: What do you want to write about? What is your thesis? What are your main points? How does this new idea connect with your other ideas? In other sessions, the student arrives with a draft, in various stages of completeness, for us to review together. Typically, the student seeks help with grammar, or wants an opinion as to whether their paper “flows” or “makes sense.” As we read aloud, and I notice sentences or sections which lack clarity or internal connections, my response again is to ask the student open-ended questions: What are you trying to say here? What does this sentence mean? How does this paragraph connect to your thesis? When the student answers my questions, they often begin to “compose aloud”—even if they do not yet realize they are composing.

Emig explains that “composing aloud can be characterized” to include “verbal behaviors that directly pertain to the selection and ordering of components for a piece of written discourse” (41). In a writing center consultation, as the student orally answers my questions about the specifics of their writing product, I attempt to write down their exact words in the exact order they voice them—not at all an easy task. Not only is it difficult to write as fast as the student speaks, it is also incredibly tempting to edit rather than simply transcribe; as a consultant, it is my job to resist the temptation to replace their not-quite-right word selection with one more precise or to flip the structure of their orally shared sentence. I must keep in mind at all times that this is the student’s composition, their writing process, not mine.

My reward comes when, as I transcribe, the student begins to see how their spoken words, now written down, are their composition: in their facial expressions, I note a tiny bulb brightening: although they did not realize they were composing when they orally respond to my prompt, now that they see their words on paper, they do, and hopefully they experience the satisfaction of a job well done. These sessions convince me that composing aloud in dialogue with an active listener not only advances a student’s development of their ideas from thought to spoken to written word, but also augments their comfort and confidence in writing as a whole.

As Emig notices in her observations of her showcase subject, Lynn, composing aloud “involves the selection and arrangement of elements” and is often recursive, moving back and forth between “projecting, formulating, and reformulating” (57). Emig observes that Lynn “proceeds as if what she writes will find an audience” (64). Similarly, I have observed that, while composing aloud in writing center sessions, students begin to examine their work from the perspective of their anticipated audience. Often, as we read a draft aloud, the student automatically begins to revise, changing sentences that they now identify as not conveying the meaning they intended, noting organization issues for later correction, and catching minor grammar, word choice, and typographical errors. Hearing their words spoken out loud enables the student to recognize imprecise or misleading phrases, logical gaps in their arguments, and other areas for improvement, without being told. Reading aloud becomes composing aloud, leading student writers to anticipate the needs of their readers as readers themselves, teaching them an essential element of good writing.

Emig’s early observations and descriptions of her subjects’ composing aloud practices parallel the pedagogical benefits from reading aloud that I have observed in writing center peer consultations. My writing center experiences led me to ponder how else composing aloud might benefit writing learners. Emig’s legacy lives on in these interactions.

Composing Aloud as a Co-Requisite FYW Community College Student

—Dalel Serda, PhD student in RCP and community college writing instructor

Scott was a first-semester co-requisite, or “basic writing,” student who regularly attended class, though, usually, he had not read or prepared for discussion. He was a self-declared “bad” reader and writer but also, a self-declared “good” high school football player and present-day mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter.

During the first part of one class session, Scott sat passively listening. However, in small-group peer discussions that followed, I could see Scott become more attentive. He listened with his whole body; he was nodding and meeting gazes, smiling, making a few remarks, and he volunteered to scribe group outcomes on the whiteboard before convening for the whole class dialogue. Something was different today. The subject, it seemed, was of particular interest to him.

That day, we discussed Kellogg and Whiteford’s argument concerning the law of skill acquisition and what they term “deliberate” or goal-oriented practice in complex writing tasks. We brought up sports because we claimed it is easy to see how skill and task mastery accumulate in sports. By the time we regrouped as a whole class, Scott’s demeanor had changed drastically. He now looked alert, no longer passively disengaged. We were speaking Scott’s preferred language: sports. He understood the analogy we were making between deliberate practice in sports and deliberate practice in writing. Emig might have suggested Scott was preparing to compose aloud. She states that “composing aloud, a writer’s effort to externalize his process of composing, somehow reflects, if not parallels, his actual inner process” (40). For Scott, our classroom interactions seemed to create that very type of dynamic.

When I asked Scott to share, he stood up immediately and told us about his MMA life: he was an undefeated fighter with a coach who “would not let up.” Writing, he concluded, is like fighting—we need to practice deliberately to improve. Having a good coach or teacher helps us get better faster, he added. Scott was, in Emig’s words, composing a “portion of the [eventual written] discourse” and was “anticipat[ing] the use of a theme” (41). According to Emig, anticipating is a part of composing aloud that “often employs the exact lexicon and syntax that will appear in the finished piece of discourse” (41), a definition that accurately describes Scott’s process as he shared his MMA experiences. When he finished, the class was in awe, someone began clapping, and someone else said, “That’s the most we’ve heard you talk!” Though smiling, Scott looked deep in thought; his attention was, as Emig said, “efficiently divided” as he used the current thoughts he shared orally to consider how he would develop his ideas in future writing (41).

For that week’s reading response, Scott extended his oral narrative by claiming skill acquisition worked best when he had a coach he admired. He added that deliberate writing practice guided by a dedicated teacher and group of peers felt like personal progress. In my feedback, I told him he was doing what good academic discourse does. Not only did he interpret significant aspects of the assigned reading, but he extended the ideas by relaying them to his lived experiences and raising new questions: In what ways do teachers and peers matter when we acquire new skills? As his collaborative or discourse community, the class validated Scott’s verbalized ideas and connections. We celebrated his composing aloud and also gave rise to it with our discussion, which helped him draw connections between ideas and his lived experiences that he may not have achieved otherwise. In this way, we both witnessed Scott’s composing aloud and enabled it.

The oral composing in Emig’s study helped me see that I want my students to feel like writers for whom academic writing is personally significant and who write to share. Thus, the question is, can composing aloud within a community of academic peers help foster a personal stake in writing? It seems that for Scott it may have. We provided validation that helped motivate Scott to continue thinking, exploring, and writing about a subject that mattered a great deal to him. Emig might have said that Scott achieved a blend of what she calls “reflexive” and “extensive” writing, which I see as her call to action for teachers of writing: Can we help students write extensively—that is, academically—with the same kind of fervor they bring to reflexive or personal writing?

One of the most important aspects of my work is helping students recognize what Mina Shaughnessy calls “intellectual vibrations” that signal personal resonation (82); Emig’s most renowned research subject, Lynn, seemed to easily recognize topics worthy of “academic” writing from her life. Through orality within the community, Scott experienced this also in the most authentic ways possible because what he wrote about was a true passion—unlike Lynn, whom we do not see effecting this in Emig’s book. Learning to recognize these “vibrations,” or bodily signals, as personally significant opportunities to push an impulse into linguistic existence can, to use Emig’s language, motivate novice writers to expand ideas instead of abandoning them. With a nod to Emig’s concept of composing aloud, we see in Scott’s story that orality helps us make personally significant knowledge in community and can result in good writing. Emig brought that idea to our discipline and with it, initiated an era of writing teachers who understand that paying close attention to the words students utter or perform can give rise to meaningful writing. Today, that insight guides one of the ongoing legacies of Emig’s work.

Composing Aloud and the Prewriting Process

—Ann O’Bryan, PhD student in RCP and first-year writing instructor

In my experience teaching first-year composition at the community college and university level, I notice that students prewrite more often than once, contrary to Emig’s understanding that “prewriting occurs but once in a process” (39). Of course, the composition classroom has changed dramatically over the past half-century since Emig’s original research. We have moved away from the “teacher-centered classroom” that was typical in Emig’s career to a more student-centered classroom (38). When Emig devoted her time to this groundbreaking study, prewriting did not appear to extend beyond the meeting of pen to paper, or fingers to typewriter. I assert that prewriting starts far before that; as part of invention, it begins during classroom discussion of the writing topic and even through conversations outside of the classroom. Now, students often spend time journaling in class, participating in group work, and building ideas during class discussions. These experiences parallel Emig’s practice of having her subjects compose aloud to replicate their writing process.

When students ask their teacher questions about the writing topic and chat about various perspectives to the topic in small groups, they are composing aloud. The words might not always directly transform onto their writing assignment, but the ideas often do. This process is aligned with Emig’s idea of “anticipating,” which she helps explain by alluding directly to Jerome Bruner’s statement, “The speaker or writer rides ahead of rather than behind the edge of his utterance. He is organizing ahead, marshaling thoughts and words and transforming them into utterances, anticipating what requires saying” (41). In my experience, I notice this to be true. For example, I have assigned an essay that requires students to analyze the rhetorical strategies an author uses and determine whether they are successful. This can be challenging for students since they often respond to the content in the text rather than the rhetorical strategies the author is using to persuade readers. However, when students are given an opportunity to discuss what the rhetorical appeals mean, where they appear in the text, and what makes them successful or not, their essays become more focused on the rhetorical strategies instead of a typical reader-response focused on the content. Thus, class discussion becomes a composing-aloud technique. Here is a brief snapshot of a sample class discussion of the book Grit, by Angela Duckworth, in which the author asserts that “grit” or tenacity, and a never-give-up attitude is what creates success rather than things like IQ, good looks, or skill:

Instructor: Where do you see Duckworth using logical appeals in her text, Grit?

Julia: Is the example about the West Point cadets’ logos?

Michael: It is logos because she’s showing evidence that the few who made it through had grit. They kept going while others gave up.

Silvia: Can that be an example of ethos too?

Shawn: I was thinking that example was ethos, too.

Josephine: I think she is successful because she gives so many examples of people who had grit and eventually succeeded.

Devin: I don’t think she is successful. Maybe the West Point example is good, but what about people who are poor, or don’t grow up speaking English? She doesn’t talk about people who have special circumstances and assume everyone starts from an even playing field.

As mentioned above, following a class discussion like this one, student essays are more successfully focused on rhetorical strategies. If Emig were to produce a Part II, so to speak, it would be a worthwhile research endeavor to ask students to compose a second essay without first engaging in class discussion. Then, afterward, we could record class discussion like the one I shared above and see which ideas come up in which finished products and how often the discussion generates ideas that are not found in the essays written without discussion. Comparison of essays written before class discussion and after could show whether there is a direct improvement in writing resulting from verbal prewriting. Of course, the recording would have to be via video to avoid confusion over who is speaking, and then the researcher would compare the recording to each of the student’s drafts of the assignments.

This could get complicated if, as I suggest, prewriting sometimes occurs outside of the classroom. Emig seems to understand this when she mentions that most writers and students don’t simply write a polished draft in one sitting. They spread it out over time. Indeed, she says, “It is an extremely rare situation for writers, particularly student writers, to proceed from initial stimulus to final draft, or revision, without interruption” (40). She goes on to explain that “events and people—teachers, notably—intervene” in ways that affect the writing process (40). The researcher could ask students not to discuss the essay outside of class and trust that they will not. However, we won’t know for certain if this is the case. Alternately, students could be asked to record themselves any time they discuss their topic with their teacher, peers, family members. I realize this strategy is not without flaws, just as Emig’s composing aloud strategy is not without flaws. Perhaps this could be one way to broaden the scope of Emig’s text with our ever-changing classroom environments in mind. This method will apply in the future as the momentum toward student-led learning continues to gain greater force. It could involve an even more pronounced synergy between Emig’s ideas and evolving composing processes.

Embodied Rhetoric and Janet Emig’s “Composing Aloud”

—Rand Khalil, PhD student in English Literature and first-year writing instructor

In 2017, I started teaching English at a middle school in Amman, Jordan. As a new teacher, it was hard for me to connect with my students—especially one student, Sara. Sara would always find an excuse to leave the classroom, she had a careless attitude toward writing, and she would spend her time drawing and scribbling in her notebook. It was discouraging for me as a teacher in the very early stages of my career. However, Sara became less of a challenge when my whole pedagogy shifted after I was assigned to a new supervisor in my second year of teaching. My supervisor helped revive my passion for teaching by showing me the importance of including bodily movement and hands-on activities in my writing classes, a strategy connected to but expanding beyond Emig’s concept of composing aloud.

It was a cold Monday morning and my students were half asleep. I started my class by asking my students to stand up as I played music in the background. Students had to keep walking around the classroom as long as the music was playing, and once the music was paused, they had to work with the person closest to them. Sara reluctantly walked around the classroom and found a partner. I asked the students to brainstorm ideas by asking each other questions about a person who had impacted their life (the writing task for that specific class was crafting personal narratives). After a few awkward moments of silence, which Emig categorizes as part of the “composing aloud” process, students started chatting, laughing, and exchanging ideas. As the students were chatting, I resumed the music and asked them to walk around the classroom and find another partner. We did this for about twenty minutes.

As time passed, Sara seemed to become more comfortable and engaged in the conversation:

Sara: What if the impact of this person was negative?

Sara’s partner: I think that it’s okay. But what do you mean by that?

Sara (moving her hands and walking in circles): Well, I mean… an impact is an impact. I had a teacher in third grade that was really mean. She made me hate school.

Sara started acting out a memory of her teacher. She was pointing at her classmates and imitating the teacher’s negative attitude.

Other students (laughing): Oh, I know who you are talking about! She was tough but she meant well. I never liked how she always looked disappointed in us, though.

In this example, students were engaged in “composing aloud” as part of their prewriting process—not only by articulating their thoughts out loud, but also by moving their bodies, making gestures, and acting out scenarios inside the classroom.

Sara’s draft that week was incredibly different from what she normally turned in. I could tell that she was interested in the topic and that the conversations that happened during our activity had helped her express her thoughts in writing.

Emig not only considers verbalizing thoughts as part of the “composing aloud” process, but also any so-called “hesitation behaviors” that occur during the process of composition including hesitation, filler sounds, critical comments, and silence. Emig suggests these hesitation phenomena, combined with what she calls “composing behaviors,” which consist of direct types of actions such as planning, organizing, or editing writing, are significant in that together they accord the practice of “composing aloud a certain rhythm or tempo” (42). In other words, while students compose, they not only need to move their hands—whether by typing or scribbling—they also often need to move their whole bodies. That necessity puts composing aloud squarely in line with the way bodies communicate, a concept known as embodied rhetoric and important in the field of Rhetoric and Composition.

In Bodies of Knowledge: Embodied Rhetorics in Theory and Practice, A. Abby Knoblauch defines embodied rhetoric as “a purposeful decision to include embodied knowledge and social positionalities as forms of meaning making within the text itself” (164). Knoblauch and Marie E. Moeller talk about how understanding not only minds but bodies as producers of meaning is significant to worldmaking in composition. If we look at embodied rhetoric through Emig’s “composing aloud” lens, we can infer that students compose through their bodies and movement. As a result, rhetoric is transformed into a physical exercise as well as a mental one. By moving their bodies, Sara and other students in my class could eliminate the anxiety and stress that had hindered their composition process. The body and the mind, as demonstrated by Emig’s “composing aloud” protocol and my students’ actions, are intertwined. When Emig states that “a writer may have a characteristic tempo of composing,” her analysis seems to adumbrate the notion of embodied rhetoric articulated fifty years later in Knoblauch and Moeller’s important disciplinary work.

Emig’s construction of the “composing aloud” technique allows me as a scholar to see writing and bodily sensations as inextricably linked. The environment in which students write along with their facial expressions, bodily movements, and huffing and puffing all belong to the same picture. The framework Emig has set for us in the field of composition is invaluable. As a student and a teacher in the English Department, I look at composition now as a lively process rather than a rigid concept, an insight I derived from Emig’s composing aloud methodology in combination with more recent theories of embodied rhetoric. Together, they suggest a clear path to Emig’s continued relevance in today’s composition classrooms.

Chicane Oral Storytelling and Composing Aloud

—Lea Colchado-Joaquin, PhD student in RCP and first-year writing instructor

Picture, if you will, a house with a small but cozy living room filled with about a dozen or so children ranging from ages five to fifteen. Some kids are sitting on a shabby and plump couch, some have brought in chairs from the dining table to sit on, and others have resorted to the carpet as their seat of choice. Sitting at the center of this giddy yet respectful audience of little ears is an elder of the Chicane community. The elder is someone’s grandmother who has been entrusted to be the entertainment for the night. Tonight’s story is the tragic legend of La Llorona, otherwise known as the Weeping Woman, who drowned her children in a river out of jealousy of her husband’s mistress and now her lost soul wanders the earth looking for her children. There are gasps and hushed giggles as the elder continues crafting her story for her enthusiastic audience. There are moments when the storyteller pauses to remember the next part—you see, there are different renditions of the legend depending on where you’re from, so not every telling of La Llorona will be the same. There are also moments of silence after a particularly intense phrase has just been said within the story in order for the audience to absorb the immensity of the situation and plot. While the elder is speaking, she will rub her chin in thought or scratch her head while she tries to remember; perhaps her utterances will be drawn out as she recalls what is next. What is taking place is both an externalized and nonexternalized thinking and composing process, in the thoughts, words and actions of the grandmother, as well as a longstanding tradition within the Chicane culture, otherwise known as oral storytelling.

I begin with this anecdote of oral storytelling because it exemplifies several characteristics of Janet Emig’s composing-aloud process, that is, in her words, “a writer’s effort to externalize his process of composing, [which] somehow reflects, if not parallels, his actual inner process” (40). One of the first functions of composing aloud she discusses is the writer’s anticipation process, in which she states: “They anticipate the use of a theme or of an element, then return to the present portion of discourse, to fill out the intervening matter” (41). The anticipation aspect of the composing-aloud process is notable when oral storytellers perceive their audience and begin making decisions about which rhetorical strategies would be best; the abuela (grandmother) may use a scarier, harsher version of La Llorona for children to teach them a lesson about behaving, as opposed to a more solemn and sorrowful version more suitable for adults. Emig also discusses the syntactic components of composing aloud, which involve “lexical, rhetorical, and imagaic components… [and] basic transforming operations—addition; deletion; reordering or substitution; and combination, especially embedding” (41-42). This step may happen once the storyteller makes decisions whether or not to keep a certain detail or substitute a thing for a person, or perhaps decide to do a combination of both, such as an abuela might do when recounting if La Llorona had three children instead of two, or if she was fair skinned instead of having a darker skin tone.

In addition, Emig emphasizes that the composing-aloud process is not only comprised of words spoken out loud but also includes “hesitation behaviors,” a term she uses to describe such activities on the part of writers as “making filler sounds; making critical comments; expressing feelings and attitudes… even the student writer’s silence can be categorized… the silence can be seemingly ‘unfilled’—‘seemingly’ because the writer may be at these times be engaged in very important nonexternalized thinking and composition” (42). While the storyteller is engaged in more nuanced composing-aloud behaviors such as hesitation, thinking, or revision through their utterances, hand gestures, and/or silences, they are enacting nonexternalized thinking and composition. These nonexternalized thinking cues are seen in the long, drawn-out breaths of the abuela between phrases, in the expression of the abuela’s feelings when she punctuates her story with a “Can you imagine?!” and a “Pobrecitos” to express her sadness, and in the use of her hands as she scratches her chin while thinking or waves them eloquently in the air as she begins another important transition phrase in La Llorona’s story.

Oral storytelling is a vital aspect of the Chicane community. We have been engaging in the composing-aloud process for generations: from elder to elder, from abuelos to nietos, our stories have served as a lesson for the young, as after-dinner entertainment, or as testimonies to our community’s resilience within geopolitical borders. More often than not, these precious narrations must be composed on the spot, without advanced notice or speaker’s notes to read from; we are enacting a thinking-to-speech or talking-to-think composition process that up until now has remained devalued and untouched within academia. Emig’s exploratory study creates a space for further developing the acceptance of Chicane oral storytelling as a valid form of inscription and of the composing process within Rhetoric and Composition studies. Who would have imagined that this short text could have paved the way for such exciting possibilities?

Composing Aloud Collaboratively: Emig in the First-Year Writing Classroom

—Paul Butler, Faculty in RCP and research seminar instructor

In the second semester of our first-year writing course, I assign a refutation or rebuttal essay as part of a unit on evaluation arguments. Focused on readings about marriage and gender, students have been most successful working with opposing arguments such as those found in Stephanie Coontz’s The Myth of Male Decline—which casts doubt on actual gains made by women in workplace settings—with a counterpart provided in Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men. Given the challenges students experience in writing this type of essay for the first time, I decided to experiment by asking the class to collaboratively draft a rebuttal aloud.

Even though I had taught Emig’s book in a graduate course, I was not thinking at that moment of composing aloud, which she defines as “a writer’s effort to externalize his process of composing,” a process she sums up “as the alternation of composing behaviors and of hesitation phenomena of various sorts” (41). Nonetheless, I must have been channeling her text when I asked students to freewrite a few paragraphs before brainstorming together. When I requested volunteers, a student began courageously: “Throughout history, the male sex has always been viewed as the superior and dominant gender when pitted against the female sex.” I typed the sentence onto an overhead screen, pausing to allow the class to digest the words. As I was about to ask for the next sentence, however, a voice from the back of the room chimed in: “I thought we talked about not using words like ‘always’ because that doesn’t leave any room for a different perspective, and someone might not agree.” “Good point,” I quickly said and asked what word we might use instead to qualify the statement. “How about ‘often?’” a student asked, while another suggested “generally.”

When I asked what sentence might come next, a student proposed, “Human evolution designed men to be the stronger and faster gender, while, at the same time, creators of civilization.” As this sentence was sinking in, another student commented that this might be the general view people held, but not everyone would think the same way. “What can we say to get that point across?” I asked, and, after we recalled how thesis statements often begin, a student suggested we start with “According to conventional wisdom.”

This is the type of response that continued as the class adopted what I now realize was a form of Emig’s composing aloud, especially what she calls “anticipating,” or “the projection of a portion of discourse” (41). A few more lines from the same introduction, with additions and deletions or substitutions proposed by different students, are reproduced below:

Men, [the narrative goes,] were the ultimate leaders; they hunted for food, defended their territories, and started families. The term masculinity was coined to define the image of male strength and ambition. However, since the beginning of the twenty-first century post-industrial movement, gender roles have [become] altogether [more] integrated and thus the collapse of male dominance has begun. In the modern society of today, the physical dominance of men is soon becoming obsolete as more and more occupations require brains over brawn.

One student asked, “Shouldn’t we introduce the point we are going to refute sometime soon and then offer our thesis to rebut that argument?” A chorus of “yeses” led to the next sentence: “In ‘The Myth of Male Decline,’ Stephanie Coontz argues that the male sex will remain the dominant gender for many centuries to come.”

Our collaborative classroom writing exercise encompasses many of Emig’s insights on writing processes. In explaining the composing aloud construct, Emig talks about the importance of prewriting, planning, and anticipating. Emig contends prewriting stretches “from the time a writer begins to perceive selectively certain features of his inner and/or outer environment with a view to writing about them—usually at the instigation of a stimulus—to the time when he first puts words or phrases on paper” (39). Students clearly engaged in prewriting in thinking carefully about the texts we read, discussing them, and then preparing to write about them, at my prompting. Then, when they wrote the first two paragraphs in class, they moved on to planning, which, says Emig, “refers to any oral and written establishment of elements and parameters before or during a discursive formulation” (39). While students undoubtedly benefited from the time they had to plan, the real heart of their exercise consisted of anticipating, which, according to Emig, “often employs the exact lexicon and syntax that will appear in the finished piece” (41), a description that clearly fits what happened in my classroom. In reviewing the students’ exchanges, it’s also worth noting that they engaged in some of the indirect hesitation behaviors Emig describes such as filler sounds, silence, critical comments, and digressions (41-42).

The practice of composing aloud shows that once an idea enters the public sphere for general consumption, the writer no longer controls the ways in which their concept will evolve over the years. Unlike Lynn and the other research subjects in Emig’s study, my students were not working individually with an instructor who was tape recording their words in a small space, but many elements of the talking aloud theory were present in the classroom. Thus, Emig’s concept seems to have a lot of continuing potential for innovative uses in writing classrooms today. Composing with students may be a productive step for all writing instructors to take.

Conclusion

In considering the legacy of The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, one might examine the direct results of Emig’s case study methodology, as Joan Pettigrew did in reviewing forty-seven studies of student composing processes conducted in the ten-year period following the publication of Emig’s book. While Pettigrew’s study was wide-ranging, our inquiry was far narrower. In looking specifically at how Emig’s “composing aloud” methods have filtered into or appeared in everyday practice and pedagogy, often in ways we would not have normally considered, we share the conclusion of Sharon Pianko:

The act of reflection during composing—behaviorally manifested as pauses and rescannings and heretofore ignored as a component of the composing process—is the single most significant aspect of the composing process revealed by this study. It is reflection which stimulates the growth of consciousness in students about the numerous mental and linguistic strategies they command and about the many lexical, syntactical, organizational choices they make—many of which occur simultaneously—during the act of composing. (277)

As we reflected on our own composing-aloud experiences, we discovered that they form an important part of our everyday practices. Virginia, for instance, found that the peer mentoring process in writing centers can lead to a productive, antiphonal type of dialogue when students speak aloud through their writing ideas with consultants and listen to their responses. Can composing aloud help “make knowledge in community,” as Dalel asks, cultivating a personal stake in writing and inspiring reluctant writers? For Ann, the act of prewriting can be especially effective when enacted as a talk-aloud activity, the discussions both inside and outside the classroom contributing to an environment of invention. Rand draws connections between composing aloud and embodied rhetoric, her classroom activities designed to combine speaking with movement, gestures, and other interactions to create a favorable writing milieu. For Lea, oral storytelling in the Chicane community touches on talk-alouds through revised utterances, hand gestures, or silences, and the resulting narratives forge unity among generations. Paul enumerates some of the benefits of composing aloud collaboratively in a natural progression of Emig’s idea through active student behaviors such as planning, anticipating, and digressing.

While much in the field of composition has changed in the last half century as we turned to social construction and embraced a wider range of communities and literacies, we believe that Emig’s work, especially her composing-aloud method, would benefit from reconsideration. It is time for such a disciplinary recovery project. Social construction has given way to new approaches, often attached to diverse student populations entering the university. With examples such as teaching for transfer and anti-racist pedagogies as well as a newfound interest among researchers in literacy practices and histories inside BIPOC, working class, and immigrant communities (Kynard; Carter and Thelin; Lee), we are convinced that Emig’s work has something to say to us now if we are willing to listen. For example, we see links between Emig and the methods in her monograph and these current areas of investigation:

1. Inner Speech and Writing: Emig was well aware of Lev Vygotsky and his work on inner speech, which bears directly on the composing process in major ways. We might speculate that Emig’s choice of a talk-aloud protocol was chosen not only to trace the shape of the composing process but also to begin to probe, in an extremely preliminary way, of course, the shapes of inner speech and their relations to writing. Recent research in psychology has refined and extended the training of observers and their recording of how their inner speech seems to work. Further, such accounts are being aggregated into large databases so that patterns and potential conclusions about inner speech can be drawn (Anderson-Day, et al.). With digital devices and apps everywhere, including on personal cell phones, we are in the position to go far beyond speak aloud, since any individual can tape record and video record their composing processes and aspects of their inner-speech processes with ease, as Stacey Pigg has convincingly demonstrated in Transient Literacies in Action: Composing with the Mobile Surround. In undertaking these practices, of course, it’s possible to form many different perspectives. Arguably, Pigg’s fieldwork intimates that we seem ready to take a step forward and reengage with inner speech and its relation to composing once more, but this time utilizing the new technologies now available to nearly everyone, including our students.

2. Synthesizing the Social with the Individual in Writing: Social construction in composition did not so much extend process as it simply abandoned it, at least as an area of research (Bartholomae). By the end of the 1980s, process research was mostly over. If the critique of process was that it was too individualistic, the logical response to that was not to abandon process but to extend it, bringing together the study of communities and the study of the composing processes of the writers in those communities. What effects, if any, does the community with which one affiliates have on the rhetoric and individual processes of a writer? For example, how does being a first-generation college student (Ritter) or a working-class college student (Carter and Thelin) affect the outcome? Specifically, how do such students think differently about writing as indicated both by their own process accounts and the themes of the wider community with which they are affiliated? Do their writing processes (and composing- aloud protocols) support, extend, or disconfirm Basil Bernstein’s claim of a restricted versus an elaborated code?

3. Teaching for Transfer and Reflection: Emig uses composing-aloud protocols as well as follow-up interviews and the collection of written artifacts from each student (see her appendix, especially). Note Emig requests that each student write a literacy autobiography to assist her research, one of the first appearances of that activity, which draws on John Dewey’s concept that learning occurs when we reflect on experience. Without reflection, according to Dewey, there is no learning. This idea plays an important role in Emig’s work (we see traces of this in her composing-aloud practices as well as her interviews). Kathleen Blake Yancey has made reflection a central place in her work on teaching for transfer, which has been formative for composition in the last decade or so.
   
   If the talk alouds are on the way to becoming oral reflection, a kind of micro-reflection, then what are the interrelations between composing aloud and both spoken and written reflection after and between writing tasks? Stinnett’s recent 2023 research published in Composition Forum—a case study of one student and an examination of her writing over a semester in first-year writing based on her community affiliations and her personal motives—is one exemplary offshoot of teaching-for-transfer research; it uses the case study method to probe motives and what Stinnett calls “knowledge activation.” What if that study added a layer of composing-aloud protocols and investigation of the student’s writing process to more deeply understand the activity of writing transfer? Surely, the field would benefit from examining these questions.

4. Black, Indigenous, Person of Color (BIPOC) and Social and Linguistic Justice in Writing: In her Call for Proposals for the 2024 Conference on College Composition and Communication, Jennifer Sano-Franchini recognizes the importance of the field’s BIPOC scholars in fighting inequities and advocating for linguistic and social justice, securing transformative change alongside queer, feminist, disabled, and other minoritized communities. One important question Sano-Franchini asks is how BIPOC and other marginalized communities can “bring nuance to our understandings of rhetoric and writing broadly.” What possibilities exist in composition classrooms for composing-aloud pedagogies that reject monolingual approaches and envision race-conscious translingualism, including code-meshing and other forms of textual negotiation (Do and Rowan)? To what extent could a collaborative type of language diversity be achieved through talk alouds that draw on multilingual language backgrounds and mixed student voices? At the same time, how might such a protocol practice advance our thinking about broader questions of race, identity, and language? Trying to answer these questions seems a significant way of extending Emig’s composing-aloud methods.

In his review of The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, Richard Larson states that “one major value of [Emig’s] work… is that it opens doors and charts paths; if it does not try to offer definitive answers to our questions about how young writers compose, it does ask questions that need to be confronted, and it discloses the enormous gaps in the ‘knowledge’ on which we proceed when we teach composing” (138). Larson evokes the promise of composing-aloud methods, which we have reflected upon here, drawing from our personal experiences and extending our understanding to include some broader disciplinary implications. In our view, Emig’s groundbreaking concept withstands the test of time. Its potential seems unlimited, and it remains as rich a resource today as it did when her book was published five decades ago.

Notes

[1] We would like to thank James Zebroski of the University of Houston for a productive exchange about extending Janet Emig’s ideas on composing aloud to current discussions in Composition Studies theory and scholarship.

Works Cited

Anderson-Day, Ben, et al. The Brain’s Conversation with Itself: Neural Substrates of Dialogic Inner Speech. Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience, vol. 11, no. 1, 2016, pp. 110–0.

Bartholomae, David. Inventing the University. Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 5, no. 1, 1986, pp. 4–23.

Bernstein, Basil. Class, Codes, and Control: Theoretical Studies toward a Sociology of Language. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971.

Birnbaum, June, Janet Emig, and Douglas Fisher. Case Studies: Placing Literacy Phenomena within Their Actual Context. Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts, edited by James Flood, et al., Taylor & Francis, 2002, pp. 192–200.

Braddock, Richard Reed, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer. Research in Written Composition. NCTE, 1963.

Carter, Genesea M., and William H. Thelin, eds. Class in the Composition Classroom: Pedagogy and the Working Class. 1st edition. UP of Colorado/Utah State UP, 2017.

Coontz, Stephanie. The Myth of Male Decline. The New York Times, 29 Sep. 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/opinion/sunday/the-myth-of-male-decline.html. Accessed 9 Nov. 2022.

Dewey, John. How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process. D.C. Heath, 1933.

Do, Tom, and Karen Rowan, eds. Racing Translingualism in Composition: Toward a Race-Conscious Translingualism. UP of Colorado/Utah State UP, 2022.

Duckworth, Angela. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Scribner, 2018.

Emig, Janet. The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. NCTE, 1971.

Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing. College Composition and Communication, vol. 32, no. 4, 1981, pp. 365–87.

Kellogg, Ronald T., and Alison P. Whiteford. Training Advanced Writing Skills: The Case for Deliberate Practice. Educational Psychologist, vol. 44, no. 4, 2009, pp. 250–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520903213600.

Knoblauch, A. Abby, and Marie E. Moeller, editors. Bodies of Knowledge: Embodied Rhetorics in Theory and Practice. UP of Colorado/Utah State UP, 2022.

Kynard, Carmen. Vernacular Intersections Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies Studies. SUNY P, 2014.

Larson, Richard L. Review of The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders by Janet Emig. The English Journal, vol. 62, no. 1, 1973, pp. 137–39.

Lee, Soyeon. Understanding Multilingual Migrants through Discourse-Based Interviews. Composition Forum, vol. 49, Summer 2022. https://www.compositionforum.com/issue/49/multilingual.php. Accessed 1 Sept. 2023.

Nelms, Gerald. Reassessing Janet Emig’s The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders: An Historical Perspective. Rhetoric Review, vol. 13, no. 1, 1994, pp. 108–30.

North, Stephen. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Heinemann-Boynton/Cook, 1987.

Pettigrew, Joan. Studies of the Composing Process: A Selective Review. Research in Composition Newsletter, vol. 2, no. 1, 1981.

Pianko, Sharon. Reflection: A Critical Component of the Composing Process. College Composition and Communication, vol. 30, no. 3, 1979, pp. 275–78.

Pigg, Stacey. Transient Literacies in Action: Composing with the Mobile Surround. The WAC Clearinghouse/UP of Colorado, 2020. http://doi.org/10.37514/WRI-B.2020.1015.

Ritter, Kelly, ed. Beyond Fitting In: Rethinking First-Generation Writing and Literacy Education. MLA, 2023.

Rosin, Hannah. The End of Men. The Atlantic, Jul./Aug. 2010. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/. Accessed 9 Nov. 2022.

Sano-Franchini, Jennifer. Conference on College Composition & Communication 2024 Call for Proposals. https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/call-2024. Accessed 3 Sept. 2023.

Shaughnessy, Mina P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. Oxford UP, 1977.

Stinnett, Jerry. Making Self, Making Context: Personal Meaning, Generative Dispositions, and Transfer in First-Year Composition. Composition Forum, vol. 51, Spring 2023. https://www.compositionforum.com/issue/51/making-self.php. Accessed 31 Aug. 2023.

Voss, Ralph F. Janet Emig’s The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders: A Reassessment. College Composition and Communication, vol. 34, no. 3, 1983, pp. 278–83.

Vygotsky, Lev S. Thought and Language. Revised and expanded edition. MIT P, 2012.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake, ed. A Rhetoric of Reflection. Utah State UP, 2016.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak. Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing. Utah State UP, 2014.