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"The act of composing with writing cannot be severed from the act of composing with our senses."
-Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Embodied Literacies (2003)
To begin, a familiar scene to the writing teacher: a first-year writing student of mine-I'll call her Mary-had come to my office to discuss an essay draft. She seemed most vexed by my comment that parts of her draft lacked "flow," especially in the opening paragraph. I tried to minimize that concern, suggesting that she prioritize bigger picture questions first. We nevertheless began talking about flow, and I tried first to describe it: flow is when the reader feels connections that leap up and pull us along, I said. When flow lacks, each sentence feels like its own distinct island and the reader must laboriously swim to reach the next one. These attempts to describe flow to Mary-even partnered with my emphatic swimming gestures-were appropriately met with squinty eyes and mumbled "uh huhs."
So I ditched flow, moving on to another means of talking about textual cohesion, the known-new contract. This concept, I told Mary, encourages writers to start a new sentence with the focus of the previous sentence. Known-new felt like a more concrete approach than flow; it could pull us down into the architecture of Mary's sentences on the page. Mary clearly grasped the idea of known-new (before introducing something new, her second sentence should begin with what she had focused on in the first sentence), but she froze a bit when I asked her to spot the subject in her opening sentence. While this approach might have eventually gotten...