How can I know what I mean until I see what I say? E. M. Forester

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1 How can I know what I mean until I see what I say? E. M. Forester Success in expressive, personal writing improves self-worth. Why? How does that happen? Writing Transforms Experience: One basic motive for art and personal expression is poison-changing. Life is often painful and confusing and filled with loss. Poison-changing is the astonishing human ability to accept whatever life throws at us, and convert it, transform it within ourselves into power and learning and beauty in the act of making art. This transformation allows catharsis. Consider the paradox of blues music, of tragic poems and drama, of Picasso s Guernica. Writing Is A Sharing Of Experience: Another basic motive for art and personal expression is celebration. When we are moved to joy and delight, we are moved to share it (although often we think we don't know how, so we buy a card). Expressed Pain Shrinks; Expressed Joy Grows: When the hammer hits our thumbs, we must express. It feels better when we do. Consider this: If you are home alone and hammer your thumb, you will express. However, if there is someone else within earshot, you will express more loudly. We like sharing our pain. When we are awed by beauty or surprised by joy, we also express. It feels larger, more complete when we do. The more accurate our expression, the more it satisfies. Whether or not the expression is shared, it feels better having expressed. Shared Pain Shrinks; Shared Joy Grows: When we do share the expression our pain shrinks more; shared delight expands more. Combining the relief of 'getting it said' with the sense of having been understood, of having bonded emotionally with an other for a moment, is central to the act of sharing art, a personal letter, or a fallen leaf which somehow briefly contains your feelings. We intuitively recognize with joy the moment when we have transformed an experience by making it communicable. Copyright

2 The Transforming And Sharing Of Experience Makes Us Feel Worthy It changes the way we see ourselves. It bonds us with what is outside the self, which seems to be a basic human need. Learning ways to transform experience is a survival trait and we feel good when we recognize our own strength. Intra-Personal Communication Writing is communication with the self. That is always the case. If it is shared with others, it is inter-personal communication but most writing is never shared except with the self. This is not a word game. Sharing with the self is an important concept. Through the ages, humans have regarded themselves as divided, fragmented, confused, pulled-in-all-directions creatures. We have always seen ourselves as a mix of angel and devil, of id and ego and libido, of right brain/left brain. Walt Whitman said it: I contain multitudes. Recent brain neurology information simply confirms what we have known all along. We know, for example, that some large and crucial portions of our brain are without the power of speech. We know that the part that does speak cannot make pictures. We know that the connections between the halves of the neocortex and the connections between the neocortex and the limbic systems are puzzlingly small. We are divided creatures. We've always known that. Expressive writing might be thought of as a way to temporarily give the speechless parts of ourselves the power of words. At its best, the act of writing is an act of self-integration, a way of achieving a temporary union of our disparate and often contradictory parts. We feel, however briefly, whole. This makes us feel wonderful. The Sense/Emotion Link: Learning Efficiency The improvement of self-worth through the practice of writing works most efficiently when the emotions are strongly involved. Copyright

3 We have learned where in the brain the emotions center; we have also learned where sensory information is processed. They are often the same places. Implication? Language which is intended to move us emotionally had better be language that is aimed at the senses. This is a simple notion, but a powerful one. The language of the senses is concrete language, words which refer to tangible toe-stubbing reality, words which aim at our eyes and our noses, our tongues and our skins. Sensory language has the ability to evoke emotion in our selves and in others. Abstract language does not have this ability. Who Owns the Language? Each of us has a personal relationship with language. Success in writing improves our relationship with language. This enables success in other kinds of language use. Many children, clearly, have a miserable relationship with language. The general perception is that someone else owns the language the teacher, the English text, the media and are in charge of its use. Many kids feel tyrannized by words. They do not know that they each own the language, that they have the power to use it well. The starting point in enabling a sense of language ownership is personal writing. Personal writing is by far the easiest kind of writing for kids to legitimately succeed with. Personal Writing Motivates Kids to Write Well. How? It gives them real reasons to write. It ensures productivity: we can all write about our lives. It validates their own life experience, esp. emotional experience, by treating it as important enough to write about. It enhances their sense of themselves as unique and special. It connects them to others: they discover that others enjoy sharing the results. Copyright

4 An Effective Paradox In writing exercises aimed in part at improving self-worth, the process of writing has an oddly double nature. Through portrayal of the emotional self, the writer is often moved to sadness and grief, while at the same time feeling good about the self, about having expressed something powerfully and accurately. The writer feels good because the writer: Has expressed emotionally. Has been productive. Has objectified something which before existed only internally, in the subjective world. It now is on paper, it now exists outside the self; it can now be looked at, dealt with, and shared. The intangible has been made tangible. The vague and inchoate has been made clear and existent. The chaotic has become more orderly. Success Success in writing toward improving self-esteem does not depend on a large vocabulary, experience with writing, a vivid imagination, or school success. Success in this kind of writing does depend on the relationships among the teacher and the writers, on the relative trust within the group, on the teacher's ability to facilitate kids' imaginations, and on the subject matter's inherent interest and power. A Few Notes on Self-Concept Teachers are often struck by, and troubled by, the fact that kids' personal writing is relatively fluent when they are focusing on negative Copyright

5 aspects of self, on painful or frustrating experiences. This fluency may be accounted for, briefly, in two ways: Accuracy and Practice. Accuracy Children's self-concepts do tend to be negative, especially in adolescence, because of: their relative powerlessness, both physically and operationally their sense of being unfinished society's bias: children are incomplete adults their existence in a daily school context which focuses almost exclusively on what they do not know and cannot do. And to some extent, depending on age and development, they tend to be negative because of: their growing sense of society's pains--the world is beginning to be perceived as a real can of worms. the developing conscience; the child's moral education, another example of focusing on shortcomings When kids write from a negative self-concept, that is predictable, and OK, and shouldn't surprise us. Practice Fluency results from practice. We all have much more practice in verbalizing our pains and complaints than we do our pleasures and joys, our fulfillments. We are more able to speak and write about our troubles than our successes. Our bent in this direction begins very young, and is a result of general social expectations. We reach out with words when we want the solace of others' understanding and caring, so we get more competent with that sort of language. Caution: Discrepancy! Another factor operating here is a discrepancy between experienced and reported self-worth. Restated, some reasons for this are: Skill differences: we're better verbally at the negative than we are at the positive Copyright

6 Motive differences: the negative is more socially acceptable than the positive (good news doesn't sell newspapers) Cultural differences: during developmental stages which involve the development of conscience and all the self-in-relation-to-others perceptions, the child tends to focus on shortcomings rather than positive attributes of self Summary: In any classroom on any day, given a personal writing exercise, such as a self-portrait, many or most kids will express the negatives, their dissatisfactions. They'll do this because it both fits the self-concept and it feels more do-able. Success feels more probable writing from that direction and likely is more probable. A Celebration Problem: Some kids who feel pretty good about themselves that day will want to celebrate that in the writing. The teacher should try to make celebration feel do-able also. How? Make sure you are explicit about how we are more practiced in the sad and painful. Make sure that some of the examples you provide are positive. Make sure they know that any felt emotion is valid. Make sure they know that ambivalence about the self is not only OK to write from, but is the general human condition. Copyright