Cecily Rodriguez
Prof. Gallagher
ENG 220- 0878
Oct. 2nd, 2011
Sondra Perl- Felt Sense (Draft 2)
According to Sondra Perl, while writing it does not occur with words but with “feelings or non-verbalized perceptions…the move occurs inside the writer, to what is physically felt” (Perl 30-31). Perl uses this “feeling” called Felt Sense which refers to ones feelings about writing a paper, as the most important idea. In order to write a great piece of writing you have go into your feelings about what you are attempting to write about. It needs to feel right within ones self.
Sondra Perl is a professor of English at the Herbert H. Lehman College of The New York City University of New York. She is also the founder of the New York City Writing Project. Perl also specializes in Composition and Rhetoric. She gets this term of felt sense from Eugene Gendlin, who is a philosopher at the University of Chicago. As Gendlin defines it
the soft underbelly of thought…a kind of bodily awareness that…can be used as a tool…a bodily awareness that…encompasses everything you feel and know about a given subject at a given time…It is felt in the body, yet it has meanings. It is body and mind before they split apart (Perl 31).
Felt sense is with in the body and deals with feeling while writing and also before your pen touches the paper. This is true because when you are writing a paper, first you have to write what you know on the topic itself and also incorporate your feelings along with it. It is has to make sense and feel right within the body itself. You can not just write anything and not have feelings about what you have written. Your gut has to let you know that what you have written is best for you and the topic.
In Cortes Island, British Columbia, Canada, there was a retreat in the Hollyhock Retreat Center. This is Canada’s leading Educational Retreat Center and Sondra Perl was going to be holding a workshop there called Felt Sense, Writing with the Body. During this time Perl was going to be talking about felt sense and how “writing connects the mind and body. Learn to listen to what your body knows, to what is on the edge, but not yet in words, to cultivate ‘Felt Sense’ so that your writing comes alive. Felt sense is the key to understanding how new ideas come to us” (Web). This shows us that she is dedicated to her work. She is having a workshop for anyone who writes or anyone who has the desire to write. She is willing to help others create greater pieces of writing.
Felt sense is what writers use in order to guide themselves when they are planning, drafting, and revising. We have to ask ourselves a series of questions. For example, is this right or wrong? Are the words I picked right for me rather than for the paper? “Do they capture what I’m trying to say? If not what is missing” (Perl 33). All of theses questions contribute to felt sense. It deals with how we feel about what we have written. We have to feel it in our gut. Before we write we have to think about what we feel about the topic. For any topic we need to think about images, words, ideas, phrases and even our own thoughts and feelings in order to write a well processed paper. You have to feel what you write within yourself. Write what you feel is right but also it has to be on the topic at hand. So, it should also be what feels right to you when it come to that certain topic.
In Sondra Perl’s Composing Guidelines, she has a list of things you can do in order to “discover what is on your mind” (Belanoff and Elbow 36). These guidelines are what experienced writer’s do in order to write a perfect paper. They continue to write even when they don’t know where this will take them. The more you just write the more you will learn from yourself. You should pause and ask yourself, “What is this all about?...periodically check what you have written against internal sense of where you’re going or what you wanted to say—your ‘felt sense’ (Belanoff and Elbow 36). I can relate to these things because while actually writing this paper, I did not know where I would end up by the second paragraph. I had no idea what I was writing about. But I kept on writing, paused and thought what I would write about and what point I wanted to get across. I also stopped after every paragraph to read what I wrote, to see if it made sense and if it felt good in my gut, in my “felt sense”.
While reading Perl’s work what appealed to me to be the most important idea was this “felt sense”. I had no idea what it was or what it meant. While I kept on reading, it clicked in my mind that it is a feeling in your body, that tells you what you have written is right or wrong for you. It is your gut feeling. This is important because we use our felt sense almost everyday, for whenever we need to write. Not just for a school paper, but for work too. Sondra Perl made it clear that felt sense is the most important idea because you have to go with your body and gut feeling in order to write a well written paper. Feelings, along with the topic you are given will fall into place and give you a great piece of writing.
Work Cited
- Belanoff, Pat and Elbow, Peter. Sondra Perl’s Composing Guidelines, A Community of Writers: A Course in Writing. 1987. P. 36-40.
- Perl, Sondra. Understanding Composing. P. 29-35.
- Felt Sense, Writing with the Body. www.stu.ca/inkshed/perl.pdf. Web. 2004.
Hi Cecily,
ReplyDeleteThe quotes you are using to define Felt Sense are quite good. So you are definitely doing some good research and making good decisions about what to present.
What I'd like to see you work on is your how you present the research. You quote good things, but there needs to be more detailed and deeper follow-up analysis in your handling of those quotes, using them to arrive at a discussion of your ideas at a deeper level. You might consider in future papers using more concrete evidence or stories. One student who wrote on felt sense actually described his own writing process and past experiences of having difficulties, etc., as a way to demonstrate what felt sense is. It is ok to refer to your own experience of writing as a way to say what a concept means to you.
Also, I'd like to see you work on transitions. For example, after talking about feeling something in your gut, you begin a new paragraph saying "In Cortes Island, British Columbia, Canada, there was a retreat in the Hollyhock Retreat Center." This very factual statement seemed to come a bit our of nowhere in the flow of your paper. You would need a transition between the idea in the previous paragraph and the new stuff you are introducing here. What is the relationship between what you just said about felt sense, and what you are about to add to that discussion? Transition happen between paragraphs and also on a sentence-by-sentence level. I'd like to see you work especially hard on this this semester.
I can give you further advice using this same paragraph. As I mentioned earlier, I'd like to see you work on what you do with the information you present, how you employ or build something out the research you present, how to make follow-up commentary or deepen your analysis after presenting a new quote. In this same paragraph, you talk about Perl running a workshop, and use the quote describing the workshop. This is a good quote--great stuff for furthering a description of what felt sense means! But you don't put it to use that way. Instead, you say it shows she cares about her work, a fact which probably is already clear since you point out early on that she teaches and publishes and does all kinds of work on the writing process. It's her career. So, no need to say she cares about it. You missed an opportunity here to use a great description of felt sense. This paper promises to focus on telling us what felt sense is. So that should be your focus throughout.
In some ways this paper suffers most from not doing enough with it's research. You repeat the idea that one should feel something in their gut, but you seem to only repeat it and don't develop it. What does it really mean? You also refer often to the importance of feelings, but do not develop that idea much or give real life examples of what that might mean, or what it might look like or feel like in real life. We talked in class about how it isn't that one is supposed to write down their feelings, but that an idea or a position you are taking in a paper might not feel true to what you really want to say. It seems important to discuss that distinction here.
If you want to get a sense of how to do these things, check out the papers from Matt, Ken, or Daniella V. Make an appointment to meet with me. Go to the Writing Center. Work on these issues as much as you can while you have the chance.