Sondra Perl’s contributions to composition studies were not only impactful for scholarship but also had immediate benefits for her freshman composition students. At a time when correctness over process was still prioritized in many writing instruction classrooms, she pioneered a research approach that examined how unskilled writers actually composed their work. Her groundbreaking study, ‘The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers,’ published in 1974, was the first to systematically analyze the writing behaviors of students who struggled with composition. By examining the writing process, Perl challenged the false dichotomy of labeling students as novices or geniuses. Instead, she explored what blocks inexperienced writers during composition, leading to pedagogies more aligned with students’ felt experience.

Perl’s path to composition studies was shaped by her interdisciplinary background. Born in New Jersey, she was the oldest of four children and attended Simmons College, graduating with a degree in Art History in 1969. Her curiosity about how people learn led her to switch from an M.A. in Art and Sciences at NYU to a Master of Education program, where she developed an interest in writing pedagogy. She began teaching composition at CUNY Hostos Community College, an experience that would later inform her research on unskilled writers.

Before Perl’s research, composition instruction was largely influenced by current-traditional rhetoric, which emphasized grammatical correctness, imitation of formal models, and strict rules over creativity. Adams Sherman Hill, a key figure in 19th-century composition studies, argued that ‘to know the proper use of one’s native tongue is no merit; not to know it is a positive demerit’ (1).  Hill implies that proficiency in one’s language is simply expected, while a lack of proficiency is not jut a flaw but a compounded failure. It marks this lack as not just a gap in knowledge, but as a flaw against one’s character.

Even though the composition movement, for the most part, has moved beyond current-traditional theories, these beliefs linger in classrooms and popular culture. In many classrooms and popular culture, mastery of grammar is often equated with intelligence and superiority. In the first scene in the recently released movie Wicked, Elphaba, the green witch corrects Galinda’s grammar after she says, “I could care less what other people think.” Elphaba says, “You couldn’t care less what other people think… though I doubt that” (Wicked 2024). Being able to correct another person implies that you are above their judgment—you are the expert. The tie to this moral judgment of one’s writing produced shame, exclusion, and the persistent labeling of students as bad writers rather than looking for root causes.

The Expressivist movement, led by Donald Murray and Peter Elbow, swung the pendulum from the intense scrutiny of product to the inherently liberating shift to process theory. This opened the door for teachers and scholars to take a deeper look into how a writer’s process works. Perl’s work, like this movement, emphasized that recursive writing—the process of constantly revisiting, rereading, and revising earlier parts of the text as one writes—plays a significant role in helping writers to clarify and develop their ideas as they compose.

After reading Janet Emig’s groundbreaking study, “The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders,” one of the first studies “to ask a process oriented question” (Perl xii), Perl developed her ideas for her dissertation research. Emig asked her students to “compose aloud” and then documenting their process and providing one of the first case studies of this nature. Perl says, “It was obvious to me that those of us teaching writing on CUNY campuses had no understanding of how our students wrote. In other words, we had no knowledge of the composing processes—what they did or didn’t do while writing…”(Composition Forum 29 Perl). So, Perl conducted a case study using experimental scientific methods to analyze the composing processes of five college students labeled as unskilled writers in 1978. Her goals for the study were to answer the following: “(1) How do unskilled writers write? (2) Can their writing processes be analyzed in a systematic, replicable manner? and (3) What does an increased understanding of their processes suggest about the nature of composing in general and the manner in which writing is taught in the schools?” (Perl 39). Employing experimental scientific methods within a case study framework, she designed controlled conditions to systematically observe and document students’ writing behaviors.

By structuring her case study with an experimental approach, Perl provided empirical evidence that advanced the study of writing processes. Her study revealed that many of the issues “unskilled” students have break down as they attempted to generate content. These students were so concerned with getting the write words down on paper that they continually disrupted their own creative processes editing and correcting. Perl emphasized that recursive writing plays a significant role in helping writers to clarify and develop their ideas as they compose.

Prior to this research, no one had thought to study “unskilled writers,” a term frequently used during this time, and attempt to understand what parts of the process were keeping them stuck. Her work inspired additional case studies:

“The writers were of different ages and abilities ranging from young children to (Calkins, 1980); Lamme & Childers, 1983) to adults (Seltzer, 1983), from native speakers of English (Bridwell, 1980) to speakers of Spanish (Raimes, 1985; Zamel, 1983) or Chinese (Lay, 1982), from basic writers (Hull, 1987 ;Pianko 1979) to professionals (Schwartz, 1983). Audiotapes, videotapes, and protocols were collected. Analyses were designed to cover pauses and patterns (Matsuhashi, 1981), to create cognitive process models (Flower and Hayes, 1981) and to produce theories (Green, 1990; Hairston, 1986)” (Perl xiv).

This research was modeled after the thinking of the time: faceless, distant, and without voice believing this the best way to prove one’s research to be unbiased and pure. When asked in an interview on Composition Forum whether she’d set up the research the same way Perl shared that though they were using the best methodological approaches at the time, she believes data that gathered from cultural anthropological   methods where one would enter in the natural habitat (i.e. classroom) of those being studied and observe from the perspective of fieldworker (3). Perl’s second contribution to the field of composition, Through the Teachers Eyes: Portraits of Writing Teachers at Work, where she and fellow field worker, Nancy Wilson, observed writing teachers and the interchange with their students over the course of two years.

However, this work wasn’t perceived as groundbreaking as her first. This was in part, I believe due to the storytelling nature of her research, a method she defended in a 2007 article published in English Education titled, Storytelling as Scholarship: A Writerly Approach to Research arguing that, “When research, then is written as narrative, one of its strong appeals becomes clear: stories attract and hold readers, drawing them ever more deeply into the conversation they might otherwise miss or abandon” (307). I’ve been told the writer’s job is to keep the reader turning pages and it appears this philosophy along with Perl’s “fieldwork,” her analysis of the efficacy of her case studies, and her pivot to studies through an anthropological framework have continued to guide her process.

Despite the current shift towards anthropological methods of data collecting, Perl’s experiential study of “unskilled” writers pushed scholars to question the invisible biases and toxicity of the cultural-traditional movement as writing “problems” became less focused no the error of the student to the errors bound in their writing processes, which offered several implications. First, students who’ve been labeled “remedial,” according to Perl, were caught up in the “cosmetics” of writing (58). The surface-level work of writing mechanics kept students from engaging, losing their path to the joy and discovery in the composing process. These writers were also referred to as beginners, but they bring a writing method with them. There may be “tangles in those processes” (Perl 58), but it’s not a matter of teaching a new method but working with what they already know.

Perl’s study revealed patterns in writing behaviors while also illustrating the complexity of individual composing processes (59). The study also gave evidence to the recursive behaviors in writing, suggesting the importance of “paying attention to not only forms or products but also to the explicative process through which they rise” (59). Perl’s focus is on understanding the writing processes rather than prescribing a specific progression from reflexive to extensive modes. Her research emphasizes that unskilled writers tend to write more fluently in the reflexive mode, where they can draw from personal experience, but they face greater difficulties in the extensive mode, which requires objective, fact-based writing. However, she doesn’t suggest that unskilled writers should move from reflexive to extensive writing as a process.

Instead, Perl’s key argument is that writing teachers need to understand and work with the existing processes unskilled writers use—whether reflexive or extensive—rather than imposing new, external processes on them. She advocates for recognizing the recursive nature of their composing process, helping them refine it, and intervening in ways that support their ability to write more effectively across both modes. The goal is to address the challenges of both modes in a way that helps students develop better strategies for composing overall.

The data from Perl’s study has been referenced multiple scholarly journals and became a launching point for new directions of inquiry. But, the motivation behind her research wasn’t necessarily to inspire more research, but to help composition teachers understand the breakdown in process that occurs for writers. She said, “What [unskilled writers] need are teachers who can interpret that process for them… and who can intervene in such a way that untangling their composing process leads them to create better prose” (627). Perl earned her doctorate, becoming a professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City of the University of New York. Her desire to reach the students she worked with advanced Emig’s study and introduced scientific protocols within the field of composition. This allowed for a less subjective study and unbiased revelations to reveal these hidden obstacles impacting students stuck in process.

Perl created a replicable method to sequence codable behaviors to demonstrate how individual students write, but she says that is not how she would set up her study now. She’s come to believe that since she first engineered the study that, “experimental methods used in laboratories are not well suited to studies that take place in and around classrooms” (Perl 2). She believes a study “involving field-work and participant observation” (2)  would be better suited than natural science methodologies. In the interview Perl shared this was another area of important research for her: “Another contribution important to me is a book I co-wrote with Mimi Schwartz, entitled Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction. The longer I taught writing, the more I wanted to focus on voice and to expand the options/genres for writing in college classrooms.” This book is “a study of writing teachers and how they see themselves,” lends itself to this more anthropological approach as a case study of teachers teaching writing in their classrooms.

Perl continued to be curious about writing pedagogy, which led her to develop the concept of ‘felt sense,’ a term that further deepened our understanding of the composing process. Perl wrote Felt Sense: Writing with the Body in 2004, influenced by both her doctoral study and the work of philosopher Eugene Gendlin. In her research, Perl describes felt sense as the internal, bodily awareness of meaning that a writer experiences before articulating it in words. It is a pre-verbal, intuitive knowing—a vague, embodied feeling that guides the writer toward meaning before they can fully express it in language.

Perl argues that writers can tap into their felt sense through freewriting and reflective pauses, allowing them to access deeper insights and connections in their writing. This concept is important in writing process theory because it acknowledges that meaning-making is not just a cognitive process but also an embodied experience. She says, “Felt sense, then, is the physical place where we locate what the body knows. This knowing becomes clearer as words come” (4). By tuning into their felt sense, writers can produce more authentic and coherent writing. This feels like an extension of Peter Elbow’s brain dumping (he wrote the introduction to Felt Sense), but with an internal guidance system. This internalized focus also has the potential to break through language, societal, and educational barriers because once the method is understood, each writer becomes the expert of themselves.In response to our interview email exchange on January 16th, Perl shared that this book is the work she is the most proud of. She says:

“My book, Felt Sense: Writing with the Body, brought a needed corrective to the field that seemed at that time to think of writing as strictly a cognitive or mental process. From early on, I wanted to bring the focus to the body-mind connection and tried to do so in that book and in one of my earliest articles in [College Composition & Communication,] “Understanding Composing,” which has been anthologized many times.”

At the end of the interview Perl said, “As a graduate student, I did not foresee this turn in my work, but I tend to follow my interests and passions and say yes to projects that come my way. It has been a productive and generative way of being in the field.” I believe this “bonus” lesson is a great takeaway for every graduate pursuing work in this field. If you pursue your passions within the field of composition, there is no telling where those interests may drive you.

After a 40-year career as a professor and a scholar, Pearl continues to teach online workshops, her composing guidelines designed not to impose structure but to provide support to a somewhat nebulous drafting process. Her work challenged the field of composition to reconsider assumptions and biases, opening the door for deeper inquiry into writing pedagogy, but it is her passion for the individual student that has fueled her legacy. In her 2016 CCCC Exemplar Award Acceptance Speech after 45 years in the field, she shared this vision of composition classrooms, “a vision of a democratic classrooms where students’ ideas and students’ voices are center stage and where listening and engaging in dialogue are central components that move the work forward” (164). This is the dream beyond the daily work of writing and meaning making, to provide opportunities for students to see beyond their differences and what separates, which is the unique work of student centered classroom and pedagogy.

 

Works Cited

Boe, John, and Sondra Perl. “‘There’s Humor and There’s Tears’: An Interview with Sondra Perl.” Writing on the Edge, vol. 20, no. 2, 2010, pp. 42–55.

Hill, Adams Sherman. The Principles of Rhetoric. Harper & Brothers, 1895, pp. 1–10.

Perl, Sondra. “2016 CCCC Exemplar Award Acceptance Speech: Forty-Five Years as a Compositionist.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 69, no. 1, 2017, pp. 161–64, https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc201729301.

Perl, Sondra. “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers.” Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 13, no. 4, 1979, pp. 317–36, https://doi.org/10.58680/rte201117867.

Perl, Sondra. Email Interview. 16 Jan 2025.

Perl, Sonda, Landmark Essays on Writing Process. “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers”. Hermagoras Press, 1994.

Perl, Sondra. “Research as a Recursive Process: Reconsidering ‘The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers’ 35 Years Later.” Composition Forum, vol. 29, 2014, pp. 1-8.

Perl, Sondra, et al. “Storytelling as Scholarship.” English Education, vol. 39, no. 4, 2007, pp. 306–25, https://doi.org/10.58680/ee20075961.

Perl, Sondra, & Nancy Wilson. Through the Teachers Eyes: Portraits of Writing Teachers at Work. Heinemann Educational Books. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1986.

Perl, Sondra. “Understanding Composing.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 31, no. 4, 1980, pp. 363–69, https://doi.org/10.2307/356586.

Further Readings

Lemberg, Jennifer, and Alexander Pope. “Becoming a Holocaust Educator: Purposeful Pedagogy through Inquiry.” Teachers College Press, Teachers College Press, 2021.

Perl, Sondra, et al. How Teachers Teach the Writing Process : Final Report to the National Institute of Education. Lehman College, 1985.

Perl, Sondra. On Austrian Soil : Teaching Those I Was Taught to Hate. State University of New York Press, 2005.

Perl, Sondra. “Teaching and Practice: Composing Texts, Composing Lives.” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 64, no. 4, 1994, pp. 427–50, https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.64.4.l866378560wu1g0m.

Perl, Sondra, and Nancy Wilson. Through Teachers’ Eyes : Portraits of Writing Teachers at Work. 1st ed., Heinemann, 1986.

Perl, Sondra. Writing the Holocaust: The Transformative Power of Response Journals.

Perl, Sondra. Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction. 2nd ed., Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2014.

Roccaforte, Paula. “A Response to ‘The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writer’s.’” Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 15, no. 3, 1981, pp. 285–88, https://doi.org/10.58680/rte198115771.

Wright, James Ronald. The Writing Processes of College Freshmen. 1983. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

Zhou, Huimin. The Composing Processes of Unskilled ESL Student Writers: Six Case Studies. 1994. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

Full Email interview of Sondra Perl: January 16, 2025

1. What do you feel are your most substantial contributions to the field of composition thus far?

I will remove the “thus far.” I retired from CUNY in 2016 after over forty years of teaching so I don’t expect to be making further contributions to the field. But as for what I have done, here is the work I am most proud of:  My book, Felt Sense: Writing with the Body, brought a needed corrective to the field that seemed at that time to think of writing as strictly a cognitive or mental process. From early on, I wanted to bring the focus to the body-mind connection and tried to do so in that book and in one of my earliest articles in CCC, “Understanding Composing,” which has been anthologized many times.

At a website called the CUNY Commons at the CUNY Graduate Center, one of my doctoral students made this book and an exercise I created called the Guidelines for Composing available. Right now, the audio section has a few glitches (he will be working to fix that soon), but the book is available. https://compcomm.commons.gc.cuny.edu/feltsense/  Another contribution important to me is a book I co-wrote with Mimi Schwartz, entitled Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction. The longer I taught writing, the more I wanted to focus on voice and to expand the options/genres for writing in college classrooms.

2. Are there contributions you’ve made that have been underappreciated and you feel would make a difference in the field if given their proper due?

Together with my doctoral students, we created something called the Writing Studies Tree. It was an early work using digital resources to map the genealogy of our field…mentors, collaborators, dissertation chairs, etc. I left it in the hands of Ben Miller at U/Pitt and Amanda Licastro at Swarthmore. It takes lots of curating so I suspect it got stalled with lack of funds and time to keep it going, but we loved that idea….we thought of it as a family tree of compositionists, presenting on it at CCCC for a few years and making it available to all.

3. What direction do you see the field of composition heading in, and do you believe that is the best direction?

Before I retired, I was very taken with digital stories and introduced them and what was then called “new media” in my writing classes, both graduate and undergraduate. I know the field has advanced beyond this and I see the incorporation of digital composing as important and inevitable. I don’t know what to say about how AI will impact the teaching of writing…but I hope the focus on authentic voice does not get lost.

Finally, for your larger understanding, I will mention that while I was at CUNY and then after I retired, I led professional development seminars for Holocaust and human rights educators. See www.tolinstitute.org. That work began in 2006 and I retired just last year. We used writing throughout our seminars as a way to come to grips with traumatic content and for teachers to locate themselves within this large and difficult subject. This work was based on my teaching memoir, On Austria Soil: Teaching Those I was Taught to Hate (SUNY Press).

As a graduate student I did not foresee this turn in my work but I tend to follow my interests and passions and say yes to projects that come my way. It has been a productive and generative way of being in the field.