literature, as he understood that students were more likely to be invested in their writing if they were allowed to choose topics of great importance to them. Murray believed that each editor should have his own checklist for revision. His check list involved reading for three things: focus, form and voice. Teaching As a proponent of process theory in composition studies, Murray is credited for applying this theory in the classroom. He advised teachers, when teaching writing, to "be quiet, to listen, to respond". Murray advised teachers to avoid making editing corrections in early drafts as meaning is not always discovered by the writer in the first draft. Instead, he called on teachers to provide time to students for revising multiple drafts and promote revision as a natural occurrence as opposed to a tedious task or punishment. In the time allowed for multiple drafts, teachers employ Murray's idea of teaching "unfinished writing", where teachers can encourage students to feel excited about discovering their writing and focus on the meaning of their writing, rather than teachers focusing what is right and wrong in their students' writing. While Murray's teaching strategies were especially popular in the late 20th century, his perspective on the writing process is found in the contemporary classroom for both secondary and postsecondary composition. Criticism Because Murray emphasized the importance of the individual writer, composition theorists including James Berlin contended that he neglected the social aspect of writing. Post-process theorists also saw Murray and other proponents of process theory as enabling prescribed rules that limited the writer's ability to explore through writing and harked back to Current Traditional Rhetoric. Thomas Stewart also spoke to Murray's insistence on writing in solitude, and argued Murray's "complicated aloneness" strongly influenced his writing pedagogy. Personal life Murray's first marriage ended in divorce. In 1951, he married Minnie Mae Emmerich Murray and his wife had three children, Anne, Hannah, and Lee. Daughter Lee died at 20 years of age and Murray later wrote about the experience in The Lively Shadow: Living with the Death of a Child. Murray died in December 2006 from heart failure in Durham, New Hampshire at the age of 82. He donated over 100 of his writing journals — or, as he called them, "daybooks" — to the Poynter Institute, a non-profit school for journalism with which he had long been associated. Books Man Against Earth: The Story of Tunnels