A Foreword: The Education of Writerly Attention

Dec 06, 2024

How do writers transfigure multi-dimensional physical and social experiences into words on a page?1 Imagine an early morning, a breakfast fire, trout roasting on a stick, a campsite near a lake on a mountain in the Trinity Alps in Northern California, two mules resting under a tree. Oh, speak, sweet bird. How do I collapse this sensual memory into linear language without compressing its reality beyond recognition?

Writing is about much more than expressing a sensual experience. I know that. But there writing begins to reveal its powers to novices. I raise the question not about all writing in all times and places, but about the most intimate writing—to come to know and to express how it feels and what it means to live in a human body during a moment of heightened self-awareness.

Writing as an act of educating one’s attention to embodied, embedded, and enacted activity.

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If one frames writing solely as an alchemy of experiences, one risks absurd reductions. One implies that physical experience always precedes writing. Writing, however, can be prerequisite to a discovery of the meaning of experience. Sometimes one doesn’t know what one experienced until one recalls or imagines it and takes it a step further—represents it semiotically in a text or multimodal display.

Perhaps then, writing serves as both mirror and window—a reflection of what we've lived and a portal through which we might glimpse what we've yet to understand. The act of arranging words becomes not just translation but transformation, where the writer doesn't capture experience in a linguistic cage but creates new dimensions of it, expanding the original moment into a phenomenon simultaneously in memory, language, and possibility.

In this way, writing becomes not a compression of reality but an expansion of it, each word a seed that might grow into new awareness, new inner experience, new understanding of what it means to be present in the world.

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In the rough and tumble of daily life, writing is primarily informational rather than representational; early morning fish fries in the Trinity Alps don’t make the headlines.

If one collected all of the texts produced globally in, say, one hour, from grocery lists to death certificates, 80-85% would be totally in the head, bypassing the body, by which I mean informational, expository, of short-lived relevance, like traffic signs on a freeway—often derivative or imitations of other texts. Much text is likely in future to become artificially manufactured, or at least a blend of natural and synthetic fibers.

Why, then, would writing teachers find it important to train students in writing about their physical and social experiences?

Because this practice develops the literacy of being human—the ability to translate lived experience into shared meaning. When students learn to write about their embodied experiences, they're not just practicing description; they're developing the cognitive capabilities needed to bridge the gap between sensation and understanding, between private experience and public discourse.

This development becomes especially crucial in an increasingly digital world where artificial text proliferates. The ability to ground writing in authentic physical and social experience anchors writing in the human world, helping students distinguish between manufactured content and genuine human perspective.

Moreover, this practice teaches them to notice the world around them, fostering a kind of attention that no algorithm can replicate and cultivating the very qualities that make human writing irreplaceable: the capacity to weave meaning from the raw material of lived experience.

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It can be easy to overlook how writing leads to exploration of things never directly experienced. Hypotheticals, counterfactuals, imaginative alternatives, abstract concepts, the perspectives of others. Student writers benefit from imagining what an early morning mountain breakfast fish fry might feel like, working to embody and embed symbols that might approach reality.

Sensory imagination serves to embody and embed symbols to anchor abstract thoughts in concrete sensations. When students imagine the sizzle of fish on a camp stove, the pine-scented morning air, the weight of dew on tent canvas, they're not just exercising creativity, they're developing neural pathways that carry sensory sparks to distributed brain areas including Broca and Wernicke, even when that experience is purely imagined.

Through imaginative exercises, students learn to inhabit perspectives vastly different from their own, whether it's a mountain climber at dawn, a medieval peasant at harvest, or a refugee crossing borders. This capacity for imaginative empathy becomes crucial for understanding both literature and life.

The concrete details of an imagined scene—the specific temperature of morning air, the texture of fish scales—become metaphorical tools for grasping less tangible concepts. A student who can imagine the precise moment when darkness gives way to dawn might better understand concepts like gradual change or threshold effects in other contexts.

Transforming abstract thought into vivid prose teaches students that effective writing often moves between the concrete and abstract, using sensory details as a door to open larger ideas. The imagined breakfast becomes not just an exercise in description but a laboratory for learning how to find and select details, how to find and evaluate key words, how to pace reveals, and how to layer meaning.

The act of imagining unexperienced scenarios develops mental flexibility, training students to move fluidly between the real and the possible. This capacity for creative thinking underlies everything from scientific theorizing to ethical reasoning to problem-solving.

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How does writing afford culturally embedded discursive interfaces between experience and abstract meaning? How does writing function as a technology for extending consciousness beyond the boundaries of direct perception into disciplined and coherent knowledge structures in long term memory, aka expertise?

Life is a narrative, not an exposition nor argument. A moment’s reflection tells us early morning in the mountains in reality consists of multiple narratives experienced variously by the group. There is no single narrative. Everyone shares the trout, the fried potatoes with onions, the boiled coffee, the physical space, but there really is no single story.

Life goes on, and writing provides a record on a hard drive somewhere.

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Decades of research into writing, research that revolutionized writing instruction across the curriculum during the whole-body, whole-language era in the 1990s, seems to have flattened into an oversimplified, routinized, facile process that compels teachers to forget about the significance of sunrise in the mountains and focus on thesis statements and arguments.

The writing process, that magic phrase that liberated teachers and their students from the tyranny of the written product back in the day, has taken a recalcitrant hold on pedagogical imagination in the current moment. AI has indeed disrupted THE writing process.

Instead of grading the written product, grade the writing process. Everyone understands the writing process. Integrate AI into certain steps in the process; forbid its use in other steps. Grade the chats students have with bots. Develop policies to guide classroom writing assignments in order to avoid literacy Armageddon.

This process thinking is pragmatic and practical, but it is oversimplified. It’s hard to quibble with prewriting, drafting, feedback, revision, editing, submit for a grade. Two days on prewriting, give a writing assignment for homework, one day for peer review, upload the product as a file in an LMS.

But when you peel back the shells, particularly prewriting and drafting, there isn’t much inside for the developing person. Prewriting consists of getting a prompt from a teacher and having some guided discussions with teacher direction, then writing a draft, doing something with the draft, making changes, and turning a final copy in for a grade. In many ways the student writer is perversely viewed as a human bot.

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The sensory world—the smell of fresh bread in a bakery at dawn, the rhythmic tapping of a cobbler's hammer, the way morning light catches mountain peaks—these are the irreplaceable seeds of authentic writing that AI cannot access.

Before we can thoughtfully integrate AI into writing instruction, we must first reconnect students with their own embodied experiences and sensual imagination.

What happens when we ask students to sit in a campus coffee shop for ten minutes, creating an ethnographic field record? To document the changing quality of light in their dorm room from dawn to dusk and the moods evoked? To trace the choreography of their hands as they prepare a sandwich? To map the micro-expressions that cross a stranger's face during a brief encounter?

We have somehow convinced ourselves that personal observation and documentation of daily life are too mundane for academic writing, yet these are precisely the experiences that AI cannot replicate.

The current fixation on formulaic writing processes, while pragmatically appealing in an AI age, threatens to further disconnect students from the raw material of their lived experiences. Perhaps the path forward isn't just about managing AI's role in existing writing processes, but about fundamentally rethinking what we consider worthy of writing about in the first place.

By grounding writing instruction in the embodied, embedded, and enacted world that only humans can truly know and feel, we can help students develop an authentic voice that no AI can simulate, one that emerges from their own encounters with the texture of lived experience.

Inside an axiological and teleological framework of writing pedagogy privileging both the morality and the aesthetics of authentic human writing, valuing publication as the end of the formal writing process rather than requiring submission for a grade, we relegate AI to its proper status, a digital tool with affordances and constraints that each writer learns to use productively in service of authentic, boutique, human-intentioned composition.

Learning to Read, Reading to Learn

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