The Third Example of POOR
Executive Summary

What's wrong with the executive summary presented below?

I. M. Astudent
ENG 145.13.01
February 30, 2004

Executive Summary

First published in 1972, Donald M. Murray's “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product” began a revolution in the teaching of composition that continues today. While the roots of teaching writing as a process can be traced back to England in the 1960s, it was Murray's breakthrough article that lit a fire in American composition that has yet to be extinguished. Truly, Donald M. Murray was the Charles Darwin of his generation of English teachers in that he (Murray) showed us a whole new way to look at the teaching of composition much like Charles Darwin showed us a whole new way to look at the world in which we live.

It is important to note the similarities between Darwin and Murray. Besides both of them being male, they both saw their subject matter as a something that occurred over time, as opposed to at a single point in time. Darwin's theory of general evolution looked at the present time as the result of the myriads of years and changes that preceded it, as opposed to the creation model of the world which says that the world was created in a few days---essentially a point of time in the grand cosmic scale of things. Likewise, Murray said, "Let's not look at our students' writing from a single point in time, the final product. Instead, let's create an environment in which our students experience the development of a written text." In other words, we should teach our students to look at writing a text as something that occurs over time instead of something that "just happens," like creation.

So, the important thing to know about this article is that writing is a three stage process: prewriting, writing, and rewriting---in that order. To better understand the three-stage process of writing, it might be helpful to think of it like building a house. First, you do the pre-writing. That's laying the foundation. Without a good foundation, your house will fall down. Second, writing is like putting up the walls. Just like you can't put up the walls before you lay your house's foundation, you can't do the writing without having done the pre-writing first. Finally, rewriting is like putting the roof on your house; it's must be done after the foundation (pre-writing) and the walls (writing) have been complete. I mean, who ever heard of building the roof of a house first?

Finally, Murray list some implications of teaching writing as a process. In this context, implications are like consequences; that is to say, implications are what will happen when you teach writing as a process instead of a product. Because this executive summary needs to be brief, I will not list Murray's ten implications of teaching writing as a process here.

Charles Darwin changed the way we see our world. Donald Murray changed the way we see the teaching of writing. Unfortunately, like Charles Darwin, Donald Murray will never receive the Nobel Prize---and that's too bad. Both of these great men are heroes---like Alexander the Great or Marie Curie---and they need to be recognized for their outstanding contributions to life as we know it in the third millenia since the death of Jesus Christ on the cross between two criminals in Galilee when Israel was under the rule of the Roman Empire before the Middle East became the Middle East as we know it today, a hotbed of political tension between Arabs and Jews. I mention this because Charles Darwin was an Arab, and his ethnicity goes to the context of the my examples above.

• A Reasonably Good Example of an Executive Summary
• The First Poor Example of an Executive Summary
• The Second Poor Example of an Executive Summary