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Composition is only one of the many disciplines experiencing what some have called the "emotional turn." Within composition, much of this conversation has focused on recuperating a rhetorical definition of emotion, a lineage beginning with Aristotle. Speaking from this rhetorical investment, Lynn Worsham defines emotion as "a tight braid of affect and judgment, socially constructed and lived bodily, through which the symbolic takes hold of and binds the individual, in complex and contradictory ways, to the social order and its structure of meanings" (121). I start with Worsham's definition to highlight the powerful suggestiveness of emotion. It isn't simply our private stirrings; rather, it reveals how we are positioned within the world and the myriad ways we relate to what's outside of us. Though Worsham and others such as Ellen Quandhal are invested in what this definition could mean pedagogically, neither has considered how it could impact our reading of student writing. I'd like to begin doing that, today.
In her article, "Fear, Teaching Composition, and Students' Discursive Choices: Re-thinking Connections between Emotions and College Student Writing," Sally Chandler describes an intermediate composition course in which her students wrote about their experiences as tutors at their university writing center. The fear of tutoring permeated the course, becoming "an everyday presence in the classroom" (54). Reading their final assignments, Chandler noticed that students overwhelmingly told the same story, punctuated by the same emotions. In these "conversion narratives," students had learned the same things: "fear can cause you to change and learn," or "writing, like tutoring, is a process." In other words, the essays didn't provide the developed and overt analysis that the assignment had required. Wondering why students struggled to write academic analysis in this case, Chandler discusses how students' fear in adopting new identities as tutors and as writers could have led them to clichéd resolutions and predictable representations. In other words, emotional description, what Chandler calls emotional discourse, may cover up, even preclude analysis, or cognitive discourse. Chandler does note, however, that her students' narratives of tutoring "revealed a narrative analysis of their development as writers" (59). So, in representing their feelings as tutors, students were making implicit analytical moves. They just didn't state these as conclusions, nor did they extend them to consider...