For many decades students were expected to make an outline with an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Although they were not sure what they wanted to say, they made the outline and wrote the essay to fit it. Sometimes reversing the process, they wrote the paper and then made an outline from the finished product. After marking the essays for correctness in spelling, mechanics, grammar, thesis, development, and organization, teachers returned papers to students who, in turn, stuffed them in notebooks or book bags. However, during the last twenty years, writing instructors have updated their pedagogy by focusing less on the composed product and more on the composing process.

In the on-going teaching of writing, some English teachers work from the whole to the part. They start with the whole paper by teaching outlining, organization, thesis, purpose, introduction, body, and conclusion. Then, as the semester goes on, they move into the smaller parts such as sentence structure, diction, and grammar. James L. Kinneavy found “much evidence that beginning with the whole and moving only incidentally to the parts (mechanical skills of punctuation, spelling, sentence skills, paragraph skills) does not seem to be entirely successful”. Other teachers prefer to work from the part to the whole, starting with perhaps a grammar unit before teaching the whole paper even though seventy years of research “demonstrate overwhelmingly that the isolated teaching of grammatical skills has little or no transfer to use in actual composition”. Essays are assigned and graded, while teaching focuses on general rules either starting with the whole and moving to the parts or vice versa. The connection between the teaching and the writing is not emphasized.