What do I know about the topic

Al S

ENG 309 – I-Search Paper

4/6/04

The Role of “Affect” in Writing

What I Know

What do I know about the topic? Almost nothing. I knew that the sense in which I think of “affect” is the process by which an emotional response is evoked in the reader. I knew nothing else. My question started out as “Why do we react the way we do to good writing, and to bad writing?” We all experience pleasure from the reading of good writing, and we all experience a sense of dissonance and unpleasantness from reading bad writing. The affective nature of writing is undeniable. Why is that, and how can we get a grip on it?

My Search

As I began to look into the topic, I was overwhelmed by the amount of material out there, particularly on the Web. Feeling somewhat at a loss, I pulled back to reconsider my topic. After much thought, it became clear that the answer was right in front of me – The Economist. More generally, British writing. I am a bit of an anglophile when it comes to the arts. I have greatly enjoyed all of the British literature that I have read, particularly Dickens and Thackeray. When it comes to cinema, another interest of mine, I have reveled in the British films that I have seen. The Madness of King George, the films made from the works of E. M. Forster, and the classics as presented on public television, all of these have provided me with hours of enjoyment. Even in music, I love what I hear from the UK. Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello, Squeeze, Tom Jones, the Rolling Stones, Pulp, and of course, the Beatles, are all represented in my music collection.

Why should I be drawn so to things British? It isn’t because they are our closest political ally, or because they have a lovely countryside or anything like that. It is because whatever they write, it is different from how an American would write it. This is screamingly obvious in my favorite magazine, The Economist. Even in such a mundane thing as the reporting of the news, the English do things differently. I remember the first time that I ever opened The Economist. My first impression was that there was a terribly thick mass of words, and very few pictures. What a pathetic reaction that was, and it doesn’t say very much for the milieu from which I came, where I had been conditioned to expect easily accessible news and lots of illustrations. As I grew older, and read more widely, I really came to appreciate the substance and style that I found in The Economist. What is it about the British way of writing, specifically that writing found in better, “up-market” books and publications that attracts me so?

As I have searched and thought, I found several possible avenues of exploration. One of the keywords I found was “psycholinguistics.” This is a word that made my hair stand on end. I had visions of Ph.D.s spewing rivers of unintelligible prose, such prose as even the English couldn’t make any easier or pleasurable to read.

It does relate to something I read about Chomsky’s work though, the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) that we are supposedly born with. This makes me wonder if somehow style resonates with us, if somehow the training of our minds to acquire language also somehow predisposes us to find certain ways of expression more appealing than others, even before we begin formal education. This idea turned out to be much more significant than I had originally thought, later on in my research.

Despite my doubts and fears though, I did find one book on the subject, The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology, that was immensely useful. The name of the author was Vernon Lee, and she lived from 1856 – 1935. She was an unusual Englishwoman, born in France, and spending more time out of England than in it. She spent most of her life in France, Germany, and Italy, becoming fully fluent in those languages and cultures. In 1880 her first famous book, Studies in the Eighteenth Century in Italy, came out to critical and artistic success. She came to the attention of Henry James, who wrote of her to a friend, “she has a mind.”[1] Achievements and compliments like this show just how intellectually vigorous she was. Further demonstrating her uniqueness was the expression of that vigor, which was not common for most women of the time. I will come back to her book later in the paper.

Another work dealing with the psycholinguistic side of my topic was The Psychology of Writing: The Affective Experience (1989). This book got my attention because the foreword is written by none other than Peter Elbow. In the foreword, he talks of how since the decline of the study of rhetoric from the end of the 19^th-century and until very recently, the study of invention has been neglected. He parallels that with the neglect of the study of emotion in writing. He states that because both invention and emotion are so hard to categorize and quantify, so hard to pin down, so messy, it reflects our bias towards order, rationality, and control.[2] He hopes that Brand’s work will be a first step in rectifying this oversight. I cite this book mainly as an illustration of an approach that I found not as helpful as I had at first hoped.

As I went through Brand’s book, I found that her approach sought to examine anew the role of emotion in the writing process. From her book, I learned that for much of the 20^th century in America, there was an emphasis on the practical and utilitarian in writing instruction. There was a period in the 1960s where a writing process known as “expressive writing,” came over from Britain. This became known in America as “free writing.” This relaxed phase of education lasted through the 1970s. Then, in 1981, two researchers, Flowers and Hayes, initiated the comeback of the cognitive approach as embodied in the Cognitive Process Theory.[3] This reduction of writing to a cognitive process though, ignored the role of emotions that many cognitive psychologists including giants such as Piaget and Vygotsky had acknowledged.[4] Brand then proceeds to discuss very briefly the psychology of emotions and moves on to the research component of her work.

Her research centered around having writers of all kinds, from college students to professional writers fill out questionnaires about their writing habits and states of mind. I thought that this was dangerously close to attempting to quantify the emotions, which are not amenable to being so neatly packaged. I thought it a little too fuzzy for such a broad and deep topic. Elbow himself acknowledged in his foreword however, that Brand’s work is just a first foray into a vast unexplored territory.[5]

There was one section of Brand’s book that caught my attention, and that was the section on the arousing emotion. In this section she relates the comments of a number of famous writers, such as William Carlos Williams, Ray Bradbury, Robert Ludlum, Saul Bellow, and Jessica Mitford, on their emotional state while writing. They all spoke of their excitement about what they were writing about, and they all said that it was an absolute necessity in good writing.[6]

I found this extremely interesting because of the similarity with music, which I have heard called the most emotional of the arts. When we listen to music, our feet tap, our bodies sway, our hearts race. In the movie Immortal Beloved, about Beethoven, the actor playing Beethoven declares something to the effect that when we listen to music we are in direct contact with the state of mind of the composer at the moment of creation. It is my belief that writing can also affect us in a similar fashion.

This brings me back to the book by Lee. In the introduction by David Seed, he refers to another work of Lee’s, Music and its Lovers. In it, Lee makes the link between words and the effect they have in our minds, and especially in the minds of the artistically inclined. She refers to the capacity of opera or song to highlight the word and its power of suggestion, and that “we are in the presence of the unspoken, unrecognized word with which we help to memorize, to keep hold of our fleeting impressions.”[7] She writes in The Handling of Words that she considers writing to be “the art of high and delightful perception of life by the Writer; and technically: the craft of manipulating the contents of the Reader’s mind. Hence I consider Writing as, in very special sense, an emotional art.”[8] This is my opinion exactly, though I did not have the skill to put it so until I read Lee’s work.

Other keywords that popped up quite often were rhetoric, composition, and grammar. They appeared not just in the library catalog subject headings, but also came up quite often in interviews and conversations I had with various professors in the process of researching this topic. I was quite surprised at this development, as I had thought that those professors, a Briton and a Canadian, might attribute the lack of affect in American writing solely to a mere low cultural level. They did indeed do this, but they also emphasized the study of grammar, composition, and debate, in their own educations outside of America. Both professors said that these subjects were drilled into them year after year, to such an extent that it almost drove them mad with the shear repetitiveness of it all. [9] Lee again is useful here, as she says with respect to the teaching of writing, that “The gift of writing thus comes to be developed by spontaneous, but also by deliberate exercise.”[10] The Briton said also that a very important element in his own education was being forced to read. His main criticism of American undergraduates is that they don’t read enough good writing. Lee again backs up this point by saying that 99% of learning to write is in the writing of others, and that only about 1% is in actual pedagogical instruction.[11]

This caused me to think that if Britons spend so much time studying those subjects and turn out such nice writing as result, then perhaps the gears in our English departments, all the way from the kindergarten to the university, are not meshing somehow. Someplace we seem to have lost sight of where those subjects are supposed to take us. This loss of direction is exacerbated by the American tendency to value directness and conciseness over artistry, as can be seen when one looks at magazines such as Time and Newsweek, which are completely outclassed by The Economist, which is the publication where this paper found its focus. The Matthews book also mentioned this pernicious influence on the language exerted by newspapers.[12]

The situations in the two countries with respect to language was already diverging quite early in the last century. In one interesting book entitled Prose Patterns, I found an essay by an American lawyer who had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University from 1920 – 1923. He wrote of the many conversations over tea that he had, that the British “…have a sense of humor possibly superior to the American. They have a remarkable openness to new points of view. They delight in epigram and good language. They revel in a slang of respectable edge and flavor.”[13] The American, Ralph M. Carson, was a graduate of the University of Michigan, where he had been an intercollegiate debater. These qualifications mark him as somebody of high intelligence and verbal ability; as someone who would be sensitive to the fine points of language, and he noticed those differences more than eighty years ago! I also could not fail to notice the connection with verbal ability.

Another thought which occurred to me was the contrast between rhetoric, and the American invention of the “soundbite.” The appeal to logic, credibility, and/or emotion of rhetoric, compressed into as small a unit of time as possible. What an infamous deed! Fortunately, the damage seems to be limited to this side of the Atlantic, the British still retaining their eloquence.

As an aside, when I was searching through the libraries here at Buffalo State and over at U.B., I noticed that there were many old books on the shelves in the grammar and rhetoric sections. When I picked them up, I had to blow the dust off of the tops of them. I did not see many new books in either category, not even a St. Martin’s Guide or a Funk & White. I was struck by this. Not that I expect colleges to have to teach this, but I would have thought that they would have older copies on the shelves for reference at least. Probably there are copies to be found in the reference section.

An aspect which was mentioned several times was the link between the writing and speaking. This was mentioned quite often in the reading on the evolution of the teaching of rhetoric, as well as in the Matthews book. It seems that from the Classical Age through the end of the 19^th-century, writing instruction and speaking instruction were not divided into separate fields. Then, as the 20^th-century progress, they became independent of each other. This division is still with us, as reflected in separate courses for composition and public speaking. Hopefully this breach can be repaired, as Abbott concludes in his chapter.[14]

Conclusions

My conclusion comes down to: Good writers have something that they want to say, and they have the knowledge and tools to adequately express it. Great writers have all of the above, and the artistry to present their thoughts with flair and elegance, yet not too much rococo embellishment.. I have come to the conclusion that the British writing style that I love so much affects me because the writers were the products of a rigorous education, which set high standards, provided excellent models to which to aspire, and required lots of practice. The educational methods by which they were instructed contributed to their art by not merely coaching them in the mechanics of writing and paragraph construction, but also by nourishing the seed of art that resided deep within them, nestled in among the subsoil network that Lee had referred to. I do not say that there is no good writing in America, or that all British writing is excellent, but just that when the British are good, they are very hard to match.

Further Research

For future investigation, I found that I would like to really go back to Lee’s other works, especially Music and its Lovers, and work my way forward from there, going off on tangents from time to time to explore some of the works by other authors who were mentioned. I also especially liked the way that she integrated music, writing, art, and emotion. The ability of the various arts to touch something deep inside us is amazing. I wonder what might be the common link between the action of the various senses.

As an endnote to this course and to this paper, I have to say that I was surprisingly moved by Lee’s work. I loved her emphasis on the emotional and artistic aspect of writing. She also used questionnaires and did word counts, almost like the Fry Analysis that I learned about in EDU 416. I was amazed that she was so far ahead of her time in some of the broader implications of her work, which were picked up on by people such as Ezra Pound, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Roland Barthes. I have to laugh at the remark I made at the beginning of the semester about English departments packed with “wackos.” I have found something interesting enough for me to just about forgive the rest of the incomprehensible, execrable writings that come from the desks of so many professors.

References

Abbott, Don Paul. “Rhetoric and Writing in Renaissance Europe and England.” In A Short

History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth-Century America, ed.

James J. Murphy, 95 – 120. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1990.

Bader, Arno L., Theodore Hornberger, Sigmund K. Proctor, and Carlton F. Wells, eds. Prose

Patterns. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933.

Ball, Stephan J. “English for the English Since 1906.” In Social Histories of the Secondary

Curriculum. Studies in Curriculum History I, ed. Ivor F. Goodson, 53 – 88.

Brand, Alice Glarden. The Psychology of Writing: The Affective Experience. With a foreword

by Peter Elbow. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

Brownell, W.C. The Genius of Style. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924.

Horner, Winifred Bryan. “Writing Instruction in Great Britain: Eighteenth and Nineteenth

Centuries.” In A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to

Twentieth-Century America, ed. James J. Murphy, 121 – 149. Davis, CA: Hermagoras

Press, 1990.

Lee, Vernon. The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology. London:

Bodley Head, 1923. Reprint, Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992.

Lord, Robert, Professor of Geography, BSC. Interview by author, 27 April 2004.

Matthews, Brander. Essays on English. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921. Reprint,

Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971

Nicholls, Andrew, Professor of History, BSC. Interview by author, 29 April 2004.

[1]Vernon Lee, The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology, ed. David Seed (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), ii.

[2] Alice Glarden Brand, The Psychology of Writing: The Affective Experience, with a foreword by Peter Elbow (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), xv.

[9] Professor Andrew Nicholls of the History Department, interview by author, 29 April 2004. and Professor Robert Lord of the Geography Department, interview by author, 27 April 2004.

[12] Brander Matthews, Essays on English (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921; reprint, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 124 (page citations are to the reprint edition).

[13] Arno L. Bader and others, eds., Prose Patterns (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933), 156.

[14] Don Paul Abbott, “Rhetoric and Writing in Renaissance Europe and England,” in A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth-Century America, ed. James J. Murphy (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1990), 120.