Sense. It is a common term and yet, after this week’s reading assignment, it appears to take on a vital role in the reading and writing development of students. I was amazed to discover the relationship between the utilization of senses and it effect on reading and writing. Yet, it makes perfect sense that the senses should play a central role in reading and writing since both activities seek to evoke a response. In this blog, I will elaborate on this relationship.
Last week, we discussed how writing should really be dubbed the composing process so that students, parents, teachers and school systems can better appreciate writing. In my blog from last week, I discussed how the term composing correlates with art and music, which seek to evoke an emotional response from a given audience. I was struck with how writing, music and art all utilize the composing process which seeks to stimulate within an audience member a particular sense which evokes an emotional response. Basically, the writer and artist’s work attract the visual components of a viewer (solidary reader), while music and writing (via reading out loud, theatrical productions, poetry slams, speeches) seek to draw in the audience through their olfactory sense. Hence, audience members who first use their ears are dubbed listeners. Writers seek to utilize both the hearing and visual senses so that their readers can either directly (from reading) or indirectly (from listening to a reader) visualize the situation in order to form a response. Thus, this chapter highlights that reading and writing is based on the progression of one’s development of his or her senses.
Williams writes that “Abstract ‘pictures’ can represent words and convey meaning. With this discovery, they have taken the first step toward reading, and it isn’t long before they are able to match individual written words with the things these words designate” (Williams 151). The reader learns that the child first develops his or her visual sense to describe a word or message. This development of the visual senses starts early. For example, “Infants in the pretoddler stage are very good at conveying their wants and needs through gestures, but once they reach the toddler stage parents expect them to begin communicating through speech, and gestures are no longer as readily accepted as communicative acts” (151). In this statement, Williams is highlighting that older infants are picking up visual cues and communicating back with visual gestures that both they and their audience know and can appropriately respond. Once they become toddlers, they start to develop their olfactory sense. However, the toddler still heavily relies on the visual sense to communicate his or her desire. Williams agrees stating “a child may utter the word ball and reach toward it, indicating that she wants the ball” (151). Though the toddler in this example verbally asks for ball (which shows how her olfactory sense has started to develop and both her and her parents try to adjust to her utterances [which at times will be incoherent]), she still relies on her already well developed sense of vision to evoke emotion from her parents. Thus, “they [children] take great pleasure in seeing their names in writing. They frequently will ask their parents to write their names for them. Soon… they become eager to take up the pen and paper themselves” (152).
Williams also discusses the idea of “mental models” and “mental representation” (157, 163). As children further develop their senses, they are soon able to produce vivid images while either reading or writing. During the first few weeks of class, Dr. Kearney asked us what we saw when she said a word. The one word (which escapes me at the moment) evoked a variety of descriptive reactions. Then she asked us what we visualized when we heard the term “nevertheless.” Most of us said we either visualized the word or nothing. Thus, this exercise highlighted the point Williams point that these mental images are vital to the reading and writing process since it aids in our comprehension of texts and aids the writer in producing enough pathetic proof (pathos) to evoke a reader’s emotion and understanding. Mental images reveal that since “the experiences of any two people rarely if ever match exactly” a writer must be willing to be descriptive so that the reader can somehow formulate a similar image in order to understand a particular situation (157). Thus, readers and writers must be willing to try out different “mental models” before a text is either accepted or rejected and dubbed “incomprehensible” (158).
While in high school, my sophomore English teacher tried to teach us this point. Every Monday was Pictionary Monday. We followed the game’s traditional rules and each team fought hard to win the prize. At the time, I found the game frustrating because I was a terrible drawer (still am) and I was worried that my team would lose because they would not be able to figure out the word from my picture. However, while reading this week’s chapter, I saw the beauty of this exercise. Our teacher was teaching us to try out different ways to draw an image which would be understood (and decoded) by a teammate(s). This game highlights William’s point that “additional encounters with the utterance (or in the case of Pictionary, drawing) of gull (house, etc.), furthermore, will modify the child’s existing phonetic (visual) representation, shifting it closer to the adult (general society) representation” (163). In other words, as the student’s development of olfactory and visual senses continues, students will be able through the use of different expressions or images to convey a particular meaning to their audience. Thus, “when children see the words gull and house without a context, they are able to assign a meaning to these words, although the meaning to these words, although the meaning will be linked to the associated mental representation… available” (163).
This chapter was very educational and I was excited to see how strong a role the development of senses play in the reading and writing process. I think that the portion on utilization of the internet was equally interesting! I was excited to see another example of simulation on the bottom of page 167! I will miss our class discussion this Thursday but I look forward to the next one! If anyone is interested in ever presenting at a conference, I strongly recommend the following two websites:
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/
http://www.h-net.org/announce/group.cgi?type=CFPs
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