Reading these chapters of Sondra’s and the foreword by Peter Elbow brought me back to a conference I attended last summer on the relationship between writing and speaking. The conference theme, itself, was inspired by Elbow’s most recent book, Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing, and I gave a presentation on something like felt sense (although, at the time, I knew very little about it). In his foreword to Sondra’s book, Elbow wonders, “Is writing the culprit in drowning out felt sense? It seems so. After all, the very fact of having to find the letters for spelling every word we write adds an external standard for judging written words wrong” (vii). It’s because of these feelings of anxiety we sometimes associate with writing that Elbow suggests we learn to speak–or “blurt”–onto the page. In my presentation, I was interested in exploring how we can inspire students to want to blurt out language despite the verbal reluctance and timidity they carry with them into the classroom (especially my engineering students at NYU). My research focused on the function of images to draw out language, but, in the Q and A, Peter and a few other participants brought up Sondra’s work to suggest that we can draw out a felt sense through, not just silence, but sensory stimulation as well.
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