For more than four decades, the dominant model for pedagogy and research in the field of composition has been a how-centered process approach to writing instruction, which involves studying the writing that students produce to expose the various stages of their writing process. By looking at notes, outlines, and multiple drafts, often presented by students together in the form of a portfolio, instructors can identify unproductive habits that students may have and provide techniques that help them improve their writing. In this groundbreaking volume, Kyle Jensen critiques traditional how-centered process instruction and presents a sound, practical methodology by which portfolios and online writing archives—digital interfaces that expose the marks of revision writers make during composition—might be employed to develop theories about what writing is: how it occurs, functions, circulates, creates meaning, and forms its subjects. Offering online writing archives as a way to envision a transdisciplinary approach to writing studies, Reimagining Process does not abandon the prevailing concepts of process pedagogy but rather casts them in wider contexts to conceive new ways of teaching and studying writing. 

Kyle Jensen is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Texas. He has published essays in the edited collections Beyond Postprocess and Writing Posthumanism, Posthuman Writing, as well as in journals such as JAC and Rhetoric Review.

“Offering a what-centered approach to writing, Jensen makes a persuasive and compelling case for how our study and teaching of writing have been limited by how-centered process approaches (focused on literate development, reflection, and traditional portfolios) and describing the possibilities opened up by the use of online archives, especially in helping students develop a more expansive (and materially grounded) understanding of what writing is and does. This book makes a valuable contribution to a materialist perspective on writing.”—Anis Bawarshi, University of Washington

“Reimagining Process will shift the way the field of rhetoric and composition studies understands the term ‘process.’ As a ‘how-centered’ approach, process tends to replicate the dynamic of the teacher-centered classroom while hiding it; instead, if we see process as a ‘what-centered’ approach, we have the potential to see process as a material dynamic that can be made visible most clearly in the virtual archive. This is a brilliant rearticulation of the intersection between the process of writing and the archival networks that make it manifest.”—Michael Bernard-Donals, Nancy Hoefs Professor of English, University of Wisconsin–Madison

"Jensen has given our field a courageous and important book that is sure to spark many productive acts of reimagination." —Meredith Kruse, Rhetoric Review