I Can’t Do Cartwheels, So I Write - Students’Writing Affect

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by kopisore

“I Can’t Do Cartwheels, So I Write” examines how high school students preparing for college experience writing both inside and outside school. Using an ethnographic case study, it shows that affective experiences vary across domains in ways tied to embodiment, relationships, and movement, shaping students’ orientation toward personal out-of-school writing versus academic in-school writing. The article argues that affect should be central to composition theory, research, and teaching, and proposes writing pedagogies to better mobilize preferred embodied, relational, and movement-based affects.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages19

Reading Time48 min

AccessFree to download

Students’ Writing Affect

Affective Bodies, Relationships, and Movement

Students’ Orientations and Domain Differences

Methodology and Research Questions

“I Can’t Do Cartwheels, So I Write”: Students’Writing Affect Amy D. Williams This article uses an ethnographic case study of high school writers preparing for college to explore students’ writing experiences in and outside of school. In each domain, students experience affects related to embodiment, relationships, and movement, but the study reveals qualitative differences in those affective experiences. These differences seem to underlie students’overall orientation toward personal, out-of-school writing and away from in-school writing. Interpreting students’ orientations as affective responses or consequences, the author offers suggestions for writing pedagogies that might arouse the embodied, relational, and movement affects students prefer within the domain of academic writing. The article thus positions the study of affect as integral to composition theory, research, and teaching. ithin Waffect Composition as a post-1960 discipline, intimations of bodily appear as early as Sondra Perl’s 1980 work on composing pro- cesses. Borrowing a term from philosopher Eugene Gendlin, Perl labels hesitations in students’ writing processes as “felt sense,” which she applies to writing in this way: “The move is not to any words on the page nor to the topic but to feelings or non-verbalized perceptions that surround the words, or to what the words already present evoke in the writer. The move draws on sense experience . . . . The move occurs inside the writer, to what is physically felt”(364-365, italics in original) . Perl’s use of felt sense bears striking similarities to contemporary affect theory, which grounds subjective experience in embodied sensory perceptions that may precede or exceed conscious recognition. In the nearly forty years since Perl, it has become almost commonplace to theorize writing as an affective relationship between writers and writing environments, which scholars describe metaphorically as ecologies, networks, matrices, and rhizomes. Marilyn Cooper’s assertion that writing is not “the product of minds somehow separated from bodies” points to the importance of a writing body’s affective experience and, indirectly, to affect’s breadth—its ability to incorporate both mind and body (18) . Despite the field’s apparent comfort with affect theory, the use of affect in research and practice “remains very much in progress”(Micciche,“Material” 489) . There is more to learn about how students affectively experience writing. This article contributes to that work by using an affective lens to explore students’ composing experiences in and outside of school. I conducted this Composition Studies 47.2 (2019): 68–87 IRB-approved research in an elective, writing-intensive workshop designed to prepare high school students—particularly students who are underrepresented in higher education—for success in college writing. These questions guided my research: • How do students affectively experience writing in academic settings, including a literacy program designed to help them develop academic writing skills? • How do students affectively experience writing outside of school? The findings reveal affective dimensions of students’ self-chosen and academic writing practices, particularly their affective orientations toward personal writing and away from academic writing. Importantly, these orientations appear to be rooted in experiential differences that exceed common emotional labels—“like” or “hate,” for example. Rather, those labels seem to function as shorthand for affects related to embodiment, relationships, and movement. Because students often use the language of emotion to describe their writing experiences, some researchers accept affect as reducible to emotion.1 For example, Joanne Addison and Sharon McGee describe the “truly affective” component of their research: asking high school and college students to identify their “feelings” about writing by selecting from options that include“enjoy,”“look fo

FAQs

What is the article’s main focus on students’ writing experiences?

It explores how students preparing for college experience writing affectively both in and out of school, emphasizing differences across domains.

Which factors shape students’ affective experiences of writing?

The study links students’ affective dimensions to embodiment, relationships, and movement rather than only to emotion labels like “like” or “hate”.

How does the article connect affect to writing research and teaching?

It positions affect as integral to composition theory, research, and pedagogy, arguing that writing instruction can be designed to arouse embodied, relational, and movement affects students prefer.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by kopisore