Important facts to know after reading "Understanding Composing" by Sondra Pearl

After reading Sondra Pearl's "Understanding Composing", I came across some very important terms that she gave throughout the reading. A few of these terms are:

1. Recursive-returning again and again to a point or points already made.

2. Felt sense-the focus of the writers' attention. The reading also gives the definition through the words of Eugene Gendlin, a philosopher at the University of Chicago. He says, "The term felt sense is 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 meaning. It is body and mind before they are split apart."

3. Retrospective Structuring- a process of attending, of calling up a felt sense, and of writing out of that place.

4. Projective Structuring- the ability to craft what one intends to say so that it is intelligible to others.

Sondra states very interesting methods of writing any composition, and as I am writing this right now, I am finding myself using the techniques in which she states in the reading. I will now speak about a few of the points that Sondra makes throughout the reading that I believe are essential for writing to the best of one's ability. Sondra states patterns that seem to occur when writing and composition and she believes that answering this is quiet difficult, and it is. She explains that *recursiveness, and recognizing it when writing is important to any writer. She states that writing is a recursive process, which means that a writer may go backwards when writing, and not forwards. Sondra says that writers return to the sentence or paragraph they have written, and read it over, making sure it makes sense to them, asking themselves if the reader will understand what he or she is trying to write, and making sure correct vocabulary and syntax is being used. I do in fact find myself doing this every single time I am writing a paper. No matter what subject the paper is for, it is always important to make sure that you reread what you have written and make sure that what you have written makes sense to yourself. If it does not make sense to yourself, then there is an extremely high chance that the reading will not make sense to the reader. Another recurring action is when a writer uses the same key word(s) or item(s) about the topic. Sondra states that writers constantly return to their notion of the topic when writing. She says that most of the time when writers get stuck, they use the topic or key word and in this way, it gets them going on and begin writing again. One final 'backward movement' in writing that Sondra spoke about, saying that it is not easy to document is felt sense. Sondra says that felt sense is always there, no matter what. With felt sense, the writers are given a topic, the writer then begins thinking about images, words, ideas, and feelings about the topic. During this point, Sondra says a writer may pause, they may go back and repeat key words and still may have an unclear understanding of the topic. She says that the writer may still be looking or waiting for an image or idea to come into their head. When the writer finally does get an idea into his or her head, and something does click, they then will begin writing and starting heading into the right direction with the composition that they are writing.

A question that Sondra asks in her article does along the lines of, “Where does the writer get his or her inspiration from?” and “How does the writer recognize it?” The answer that Sondra gives is, “the ability to recognize what one needs to do or where one needs to go is informed by calling on felt sense. This is, Sondra says, the internal criterion writers seen to use to guide then when they are planning, drafting, and revising. Sondra goes more into depth with felt sense, explaining that when felt sense is formed, we as writers match the words to it. She says that as we begin to describe it, we get to see what is there and what we know. When the process is working properly, the writer then begins to move along and sometimes move rather quickly.

Another important technique that Sondra speaks about is *retrospective structuring. She says that it is retrospective in that it begins with what is already there, inchoately, and brings whatever is there forward by using language in structured form. Sondra writes that we see something new in our writing that comes upon us as a surprise. We see in our words a further structuring of the sense we begin with and we recognize that in those words we have discovered something new about our topics and ourselves.

One final important technique that Sondra speaks about is *projective structuring. A few concerns that arise with projective structuring is that many writers act as if it is a whole process. The writers focus on what they think others want them to write about rather then looking to see what they want to write about. She also brings up the concern that many writers reduce projective structuring to a series of or criteria for evaluating finished discourse. Sondra believes that for projective structuring to function fully, writers need to draw on their capacity to move away from their own words, to decenter from the page, and project themselves into the role of the reader.