The Comp/Intent Blogger Part Three: Rhetorical Empathy

EMPATHY!!!!!!!!

This week’s assigned reading for my grad class really struck a chord with me. We read “Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy” by Lisa Blankenship. And seriously, don’t we need more empathy right now? As a world, as a country, couldn’t empathy take us far?

But that’s not the focus of this blog post. This blog post is focusing on where empathy can take our students and our teaching. What does empathy in the composition classroom look like?

Blankenship describes this as a form of Feminist rhetoric, and explains that “Feminist theory holds that the personal, the body, and difference are vital factors in decision-making and deliberation.”

Most of writing composition classes, especially for persuasive writing, are influenced by theories of Aristotle. Logos, or logic, becomes the main basis of argumentative writing. But logic and facts don’t actually persuade anyone, a reality that is expanded on in this excellent article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-someone-when-facts-fail/  The solutions offered at the end of this article are interesting, but they don’t use today’s magic word: empathy. But isn’t listening and showing understanding a form of empathy?

Logos is a great, fancy Greek term made famous by Aristotle. But there are other great fancy Greek terms. Like pathos. Pathos is an appeal to the emotions. Using empathy to appeal to emotions can be a more effective form of persuasion, or at least a most effective dialogue. And while Blankenship treats the idea of putting logos and pathos together like it’s a new concept, it’s actually something journalists have been doing for decades. How many times have you read a news article that starts with a human interest element, like “Due to pandemic, single mom Kelsey has been out of work, and now is facing eviction” then that’s followed by some nice hard logos with facts and figures on how many Americans are now facing eviction? By providing readers with this human element, we are creating empathy in our readers. People being evicted are no longer impersonal numbers, they are Kelsey the single mom. This is an impactful way to write, so why is it foreign to our composition classrooms?

Empathy also looks like forming connections with those one is trying to persuade. If you know your audience, then you should understand them enough to relate to them on some level. For example, as many of you know I’m a far left liberal, and I am vocally pro-choice. One of my dearest friends is firmly pro-life. I will never, ever persuade her to switch camps. But we have found common ground through sensitive and empathetic dialogue: we are both for better sex education in school and more easily available contraceptives. And if that isn’t a form of being pro-choice, I don’t know what is.

So what kind of assignments can we give students that incorporate both the personal and the logical in a way that creates persuasive empathy? The book offers the example of assigning a literacy narrative or a narrative about education, and then assigning students to write a persuasive piece about education that incorporates parts of the narrative essay. This meshing of two writing assignments does sound like a helpful assignment. As Blankenship describes, “The use of the personal in the form of stories disarms an audience through identification (“You’re like me on some level”) and so can help bridge gaps in understanding across marked social differences.”

I’ve actually been teaching writing that combines ethos and logos for several years now in one of my classes that I teach. An argumentative composition course, I teach several essays in this course that I love. On the first day of class, I have students list different identities that they hold. These can be anything from racial/ethnic identities to identities we take on ourselves, like pet owner and book lover. I make a list of identities that I hold on the board as an example. Then we brainstorm a list of cares/concerns that we hold based on these identities. Then I have students pick the one they are most interested in to focus on their writing for the semester. We talk about pathos and logos. We also discuss ethos, or authority, and Kairos, or timing. For the first paper they write an analysis of an argument or cultural item related to their chosen topic. How does it work? How does it fail? This paper relies on logos and ethos. For the second paper they write an op-ed style paper combining their personal experience with research. This is using logos, pathos, and ethos. By appealing to their reader’s emotions they are creating empathy. For this paper I also encourage students to consider the position of those they are trying to persuade. The audience for this paper should be those who disagree with their position, and they should consider how to best persuade or find middle ground with this audience. The third paper I assign in this class is a satire essay, which at this point students are expert enough in their topic to really pull off some amazing stuff in the satire essay. This paper focuses on reframing an argument in a way that forces the reader to consider the author’s position in a new light or from a new angle.

I would argue that teaching rhetorical empathy has positive implications for students beyond the classroom as it helps students to  become more aware and engaged in dialogues that concern them personally and as it helps them to become more empathetic and to actively seek common ground with those who view the world differently. To close with another quote from Blankenship, “Rhetorical empathy resists the echo chamber of contemporary, digital, and political culture and forces us to engage with the Other in the form of real people with real stories that, chances are, do not align with our own understanding of the world.”

The Comp/Intent Blogger Part Two: Bringing Mindfulness into the Classroom

This past week I started doing yoga. And I liked it. For those of you who know me well, you know I’m not really a fan of exercise. I attempt it as necessary; I know it’s important for one’s overall health, but I’ve never really enjoyed it. But I enjoy yoga.

As I was reading “Yoga Minds, Writing Bodies” by Christy I. Wenger for my Emergent Pedagogies class, I kept wondering about the claims of the author. Could yoga really help that much with writing? Which led me to trying it. And I’ve got to say, I do think yoga breaks during a writing day would lead to more productive writing. I don’t have a writing project for this summer, so I can’t experiment with that right now, but my yoga breaks from teaching and reading have led to increased energy and focus.

But the real argument being made for yoga and writing is yoga’s ability to ground one’s physical body. Writing is often looked at as a disembodied act, with the writer focusing solely on the mental energy used to create the words on the page. But writing is a full body exercise, with our physical location and positioning impacting the writing process. Now I do not see myself actually using yoga in my writing classes, but there are other tools in “Yoga Minds, Writing Bodies” that I can see myself adapting, as well as from this week’s reading, “Prolific Moment” by Alexandria Peary. Not all of these exercises are focused on embodiment, some are more focused on ways to be mindful in writing.

So before getting to the exercises, let’s talk a moment about mindfulness and mindlessness. Both have important roles in the writing process. From Wenger, we have this description of mindfulness:

“[W]hen we cultivate mindfulness of our thoughts and feelings, we can choose our behaviors and move beyond the habitual action-reaction cycle, which dictates how we tend to respond to situations. A re-theorization of the writing subject as a writing yogi, a contemplative writer skilled in embodied imagining, is needed in composition studies precisely because the dominant action-reaction chain that dictates how we approach students’ and teachers’ subjectivity is unresponsive to matter, and mindlessly so.”

And I love the idea of being this kind of mindful writer, but at the same time there is a time and a place for mindlessness. From Peary, there’s this description of the balance between mindfulness and mindlessness:

“Mindful composition looks for a combination of directed and undirected thinking, a healthy balance between mindfulness and what would be called an inspired mindlessness. With a mindfulness approach to writing, we strive for clear awareness of our mental actions, trying to avoid outcomes of undirected thinking such as preconceptions and outcome fixations.”

Mindlessness has several benefits. When we are mindlessly engaged in nonwriting activities, we can be inspired with ideas and solutions for our writing problems. Agatha Christie is quoted as saying “The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.” That is precisely because the mindlessness of the task invites contemplation. Our minds are skilled at filling empty time, and working out solutions during down time. I think this is why yoga could lead to writing breakthroughs: your body is engaged in the yoga moves and in your breathing, your mind is invited into a state of meditative mindlessness. While you’re not concentrating on your writing project, your subconscious will still be at work. “Prolific Moment” talks about that moment right before you know what you’re going to write about, the moment of not knowing. What if we lean into that moment right before we discover an idea to write?

More importantly, how do we bring this embodied mindfulness into our classrooms? Here are some activities to try with your classes. I do recommend experimenting with these on your own first, so that you better understand what you’re asking students to do.

1.      Guided meditation. There’s a great guided meditation at the end of “Yoga Minds, Writing Bodies” that I hope to adapt for classroom use.

2.      Free writing session. These are relatively common, with the only rule being not to stop writing.

3.      Assign a narrative essay. I use a literacy narrative in one of the freshmen composition courses I teach. I tell students to focus this essay on a strong memory associated with writing, to explore/lean into their relationship with writing. A colleague from one of the colleges I teach at shared that she assigns a narrative essay that calls on students to consider what their future in their chosen field will look like.

4.      Disposable writing. This idea comes from “Prolific Moment.” The idea is to assign students to write something that they will later delete/shred. Personally, for me, this idea makes me cringe, but I can see how this could be a valuable exercise for someone who doesn’t like writing or who is intimidated by the idea of writing for an audience.

5.      Mindfulness breathing exercise. This is also from “Prolific Moment.” The idea here is to preform a simply breathing exercise. Students are to focus on their breath for a period of time, and when their thoughts wander they are to quickly record the wondering, and then get back to mindful breathing. The wanderings are recorded as “pas” for something in the past, “fut” for something in the future, or “eva” for an attempt to evaluate the current moment. No other notes are needed.

And of course, these can be mix and matched. A guided meditation can be followed by a free write session. Mindful breathing can come before or after some disposable writing. Basically these are tools to bring your students to a state of being more mindful in their writing.

Hope this has been helpful. I’ll be back next week sharing more ways to be intentional in your writing instruction.

Comp/Intent Blogger Part One: An Intro to Embodied Writing

Hello friends! I know I haven’t blogged in…a long time…but I’m taking a graduate level course this summer, and for the next six weeks I will be blogging to share some of the things I’m learning in this course. And since many of you also teach composition, I hope these posts will be helpful for you and what you do in your classes. For those of you who don’t teach but are writers, I think you’ll find ideas and practices here that are helpful for you as well.

The course I’m taking is on emergent pedagogies, and is focusing on mindfulness and embodiment. The readings have made me think long and hard about ways to implement these ideas in my classroom, both my physical classroom when I get to teach on campus again, and my online classroom. How can we find ways to embody our writing processes virtually?

During week one, our readings focused on chapters from the book “Composing Media Composing Embodiment” with chapters written by a variety of people. One writer, Jay Dolmage, in his essay “Writing against the Normal” made the following observation:

“In composition and rhetoric we have, for too long, held onto classical generalizations that belittle the role of the body in thought and in the act of writing. And when the body has been invoked, it has been either as an impossible ideal, or as a baseline for discrimination. One solution is to seek to reconnect mind, body, and writing, and to do so focusing not on ideals, but on the body (and the text) as meaningfully messy and incomplete.”

So there’s the actual physical act of writing, the sitting down, the hands on the keyboard. I have a bad habit of sort of hunching over my key board, leading to neck and back pain if I work for too long, so I always force myself to start in a very upright typist pose…a pose that was emphasized in my high school typing class, a class that I failed…yes, I failed typing when the floppy disc containing all my work for the year mysteriously disappeared. I suspect the teacher, she was always annoyed when I finished first. So I start in this upright pose, my head facing straight ahead and my eyes peering down at the words as they appear on the screen, but then there’s always something that leads me to lean in. I think the more involved I am the more I lean towards the screen, the closer my body wants to be to the work, to the words…

 

There’s that as a form of embodied writing, this awareness of what we are doing with our bodies as we sit and write, but then there are the bodies themselves, and wrapped up in those bodies are our identities. Now speaking of identities is strictly coming from me for now, I’ve yet to read much to support this viewpoint. Some identities come from our bodies, for example I’m a white 37 year old cisgender woman with two mostly invisible disabilities. Some identities are a cross between what our body is and what we do: I am a mother, my body is marked from birthing five children, I continue to mother those children today. It’s both in my body and in my life. And aren’t the physical things we do with our bodies remembered and recorded, becoming part of our bodies? My fingers type quickly because my body has retained the knowledge of how to type. My fingers have typed countless stories and books, isn’t that knowledge also retained? When I call myself a writer, doesn’t that include my body? I would argue that we embody those identities that we take on as we act on those identities. And in fact, this view is supported by Christina V. Cedillo in her article “What Does It Mean to Move?: Race, Disability, and Critical Embodiment Pedagogy” from Composition Forum. She says “Bodies allow us to perceive and inhabit the world around us; they are sites where the social and corporeal dimensions of our lives coincide.” When it talks of the social and corporeal, I see that as the physicality of our bodies combining with our social world, the things we do with our bodies as we move through the world.

For you fellow writing teachers, I can almost hear you asking, “This is interesting, but…so what? Why should I worry about teaching embodied writing?” I hear you. In the book “Yoga Minds, Writing Bodies: Contemplative Writing Pedagogy” Christy I. Wenger presents a strong argument for embodied writing:

“[F]irst, when we acknowledge that writing always springs from our material placement, we add authority and transparency to our compositions, no matter how explicitly our content references our body; second, in this process, we necessarily move beyond the rules and structures of “conventional academic discourse;” and third, this movement engages us in a feminist endeavor that disturbs the ways patriarchal power is enforced by a malestream tendency to erase the writer’s materiality in order to create an illusion of objectivity. To write as a body…means disrupting the objectification and marginalization—in other words feminization—of bodies in the academe. No longer is distance from the body a prerequisite to truth; instead, proximity lends persuasiveness.”  

Acknowledging our bodies, bringing them into our writing, gives power to our words. It also fosters awareness and mindfulness in our students and ourselves, which I assume leads to better mental health and better writing practices.

I am still coming to terms with my disabilities. I was diagnosed as bipolar almost ten years ago, but this past year has been extremely challenging, and I’m finally beginning to recognize this as a disability. And about a year and a half ago, my eyes closed, leading to my diagnosis of blepharospasm. My body has very real limitations that impact how I interact with the world, and with my writing. In addition to bringing all of you useful tools for your writing and teaching, I hope to explore my relationship with my disabilities this summer.

 

This week we looked at what embodied writing is, and why it’s important for our writing and our students’ writings. Next week we will look at ways to bring this into our classrooms, and I’ll share with you my discovery of yoga.