Multimodal Observations Writing Activity

Genung argued “the most potent stimulus and aid to original production is the keen and intelligent use of the eyes and ears” (227), and Donald Murray, writing about one-hundred years later, says “all the writer’s senses help the writer become aware of information that may become raw material for a piece of writing” (52), and “it is important that we move out from that which is within us to what we see, feel, hear, smell, taste of the world around us” (49). This next exercise is somewhat adapted from a writing teacher I had as an undergraduate, Elizabeth Smith, who had me do numerous observation writing exercises while riding campus busses, walking to the Snake River, sitting at the university outdoor amphitheater and watching people at the Student University Building.

I allow my students to collage their writing in this assignment. A collage essay is a collection of parts, of writing, that are mashed and juxtaposed together. I use this genre because students are able to choose non-linear forms of arrangement, have more freedom with the visual look of their writing because they can break their sentences or paragraphs when their attention roves to a different subject, or they can arrange the collage for a specific effect.

DIRECTIONS: To start, explain collage essaying. Then give students a blank piece of paper and walk to some area on campus (a student art gallery, the quad, the river). Have them write down what they focus on and to break their sentence or paragraph whenever there is a break in their focus. They are instructed to write only what they feel, see, and experience through their senses, including any inner sensations, and they are allowed to write wherever and however on the paper.

This exercise is meant to develop the somatic awareness of our students. Fleckenstein describes somatic literacy as concerning “how we construct and participate in the world through our bodies and how we know the world as bodies positioned in specific sites” (79). What changes us (or does not) when we move from the classroom to some other place, and how can we communicate and complicate that experience with writing? Fleckenstein notes that “through somatic literacy, students conceptualize meaning as multi-sensual and as sited, incorporating into writing-reading the sensuality and positionality necessary for our physical existence within the world” (80).

Students use highly descriptive words to discuss the place, their position in that place, and what they feel. They vary in their focus—some choose a single object, while most tend to choose different objects and sensations, and some try to write about as many different sensations as they can. Occasionally, a student will draw map or diagram with chunks of words, or try to write about an object, like a tree, while arranging their writing into a tree.

I give students ten to fifteen minutes to write as much as they can about what they observe, and then I have students write or discuss, reflectively, about their process of observation. What did they notice first, second… what particularly struck them and what did it make them feel and think? The goal is to practice description, of course, but to also examine the relationships between how we feel, observe, imagine, and write.

Donald Murray said that “schools often overlook one of the writer’s primary sources of information: observation” (67), and he tells writers to develop their awareness through observing the world they live in, by paying attention in common places like at school or the supermarket. Murray has a similar activity where students are told to “make yourself a camera that is recording what it sees”, and to “just write down the specific details” (50). A multimodal approach to observation might also challenge writers to observe both the details in the trees and concrete, and the way it reminds us of an image from their neighborhood. It is using our senses to experience the world, and observing those re-creations of other experiences just as a cloudy grey sky in Boise might remind me of a walk in Seattle.