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xxiv INTRODUCTION is! Teaching writing (or some would say mentoring the process of writing) takes time, commitment, mounds of hard work, and lots of know-how. So with “process,” “commitment,” and “knowledge” as our bywords, we begin the third edition of our now-classic Acts of Teaching: How to Teach Writing—A Text, A Reader, and A Narrative providing educators with the research, strategies, and advice to inform their own writing pedagogy and improve students’ desire to write and com- municate in writing more effectively. THE PRODUCT AND PROCESS PARADIGMS Similar to the reading wars that pitted phonics against whole language (a phil- osophy emphasizing meaning-making), writing suffers a similar polarity: instruction that values the final product versus instruction that values process. In 2019, writing as a process is not the revolutionary concept it was in the 1990s following the backlash against whole language. However, calls to return to the basics as well as an emphasis on universal standards on text types and purposes perpetuate the product paradigm and demand students to produce “numerous pieces over short and extended time periods throughout the year” (CCSS 18). Modern textbooks regularly feature chapters on the writing process. Filled with slick graphics, these textbooks define the stages of the writing process but fail to capture the recursiveness of the process, reducing it instead to a linear checklist. As a result, we hear teachers say, “I do workshop on Tuesdays.” Intoning the word “workshop” does not automatically mean teachers engage students daily in real writing that includes collaboration around ideas in both reading and writ- ing. The writing process, a philosophy about teaching, learning, and thinking, is so much more complicated than merely putting words on paper or on a computer screen. Process-based classrooms are student-centered, and process mimics thinking and rethinking. While many reference the five stages of the process, the product paradigm endures within standards that describe how students produce, publish, and distribute their writing. As a result, the product of writing remains the singular focus of both classroom instruction and formative and summative assessments. Accountability mea- sures offer additional complications for the process/product binary, since state writing exams may integrate reading and writing, but the writing product remains the sole determiner of college and career readiness. Writing occurs within a context—“a con- vergence of time, place, events, and motivating forces” (Roskelly and Joliffe 15) that shapes the writer’s purpose for writing. A writer must make decisions about audience, purpose, genre, organization, syntax, diction, and language prior to and throughout the process of producing a text the writer must purposefully plan and intentionally select strategies to present his or her ideas. Learning to write well requires the writer to negotiate a myriad of choices that burden the writer “between initial inspiration and final polished product” (Young, Becker, and Pike 54). Writing, both the process and the product, is clearly a complex cognitive activity that transcends the binary itself. Writing is thinking and evidence of learning. Writing demands engagement of multi- ple cognitive processes while simultaneously engaging fine motor skills—it requires flexible thinking, accommodation and assimilation, and the synthesis of ideas, at once and wholly. Presently, at almost the quarter point of the 21st century, most educators know the product and process paradigms. The easiest way to see the differences in these two paradigms is by juxtaposing fifteen of the major characteristics of each side-by-side: