A writing process describes a sequence of physical and mental actions that people take as they produce any kind of text. These actions nearly universally involve tools for physical or digital inscription: e.g., chisels, pencils, brushes, chalk, dies, keyboards, touchscreens, etc.; these tools all have particular affordances that shape writers' processes. Writing processes are highly individuated and task-specific; they often involve other kinds of activities that are not usually thought of as writing per se (talking, drawing, reading, browsing, etc.). Historical and contemporary perspectives In 1972, Donald M. Murray published a brief manifesto titled "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product", in which he argued that English teachers' conventional training in literary criticism caused them to hold students' work to unhelpful standards of highly polished "finished writing". Teachers, he explained, ought to focus less on correcting students' written products and focus more on involving students in "discovery through language", which Murray believed for "most writers most of the time" involved a process: i.e., stages of "pre-writing, writing and rewriting". Though Murray was not alone in advocating process-based instruction, this manifesto is regarded as a landmark vocalization of the differences between process and product orientations in the teaching of writing. Within a decade, Maxine Hairston was to observe that the teaching of writing had undergone a transformation in moving from a focus on written products to writing processes. These categories were theorized more fully in subsequent scholarship. For example, pre-writing was defined by Project English experimental researcher D. Gordon Rohman as the "sort of 'thinking' [that] precedes writing" and the "activity of mind which brings forth and develops ideas, plans, designs". According to Rohman, writing begins "at the point where the 'writing idea' is ready for the words and the page". Even today, much "process-based" teaching has continued to broadly conceptualize writing processes along these three phases. Some have linked this three-stage process to the five canons of rhetoric: pre-writing to invention and arrangement, writing to style, and revising to delivery and sometimes memory. While contemporary research on writing processes still accepts that some kind of process is necessarily involved in producing any written text, it now collectively endorses "the fundamental idea that no codifiable or generalizable writing process exists or could exist". In this view, "writing processes are historically dynamic – not psychic states, cognitive routines, or neutral social relationships". In terms of "pre-writing", for instance, writing processes often begin