Tim Lockridge - Writing Workflows: Beyond Word Processing

Fig01. While looking at stock and Creative Commons photos for this project, we were struck by the many varying displays of mediating technologies. Here, for example, we see Post-it notes hanging from a computer monitor, more Post-its on the desk, a notebook, a keyboard, two pens, and headphonesnot to mention whatever might be running on the computer.

Research in the field of Writing Studies has excelled at capturing these many idiosyncratic approaches to writing.) ask What does computing look like in and across digital, networked spaces and the physical spaces our bodies inhabit as we compose? (Composing). The videos in On Multimodal Composing show a breadth of approaches to writing, with writers moving across technologies and through physical spaces. In her video for On Multimodal Composing, Layne M. P. Gordon describes a writing process that is highly multimodal and embodied, that relies on digital notes, handwritten notes, color, and visuals, as well as the inanimate objects that [she] surrounds herself with during a writing session (A Writing Session). Laynes video shows her working with Google Docs, Evernote, Apples Pages, and tablets of graph paper as she drafts. In another video in the online article, Michael Baumann documents the process of writing a slam poem, a collaborative process that begins with a huge messy crude constellations of ideas written by hand and that moves into typewritten documents by outlining, cutting and pasting, opening new documents to work on a section in isolation before inserting that section back into the main file. Adding line and stanza breaks. Working on different sectionsintro, middle, and conclusion in queered chronology (Creating a Slam Poem).

Similarly, in Expanding Literate Landscapes, Kevin Roozen and Joe Erickson () look at the composing processes of Lindsey Rachels, an undergraduate student whose writing process draws on her experience with art and design. Lindsey describes the process through which she wrote a literary analysis paper: spreading pages of notes across the floor, organizing them by topic, and then arranging them in groups on her desk. Her process, she says, had a hands-on patchwork feel that I associate with the crafting of a piece of artwork (Arranging American Literature).

Although much existing research has pointed to the specifics of writing processes and literate activity, the narratives of mediated writing processes are often presented as highly individual and idiosyncratic. The move to document those practices underscores the importance of individual approaches and the idea that mediated writing processes are personal, contextual, and bound up in experience, preference, and affect. The focus on the individual practice is also an echo of the process movement, which today resists the idea of one singular process being best, ideal, or universal. Yet this approach hasnt pushed usas writers ourselves