Composition Forum 47, Fall 2021
http://compositionforum.com/issue/47/

Welling Desire and Affective Rupture: Helping Students Become Hopeful Writers

Amy D. Williams

Abstract: This article reports on an IRB-approved study conducted in a college preparation writing workshop. Using affect theory as a framework for exploring participants’ writing experiences, I theorize the phenomenon of affective rupture, a tension between the affect students experience while writing in school and their belief in the value of school-based writing. I describe three patterns of behavior students use to respond to affective rupture: downplaying their own ability or capacity, willing themselves to write, or becoming apathetic about writing. While these patterns are likely familiar to composition teachers, there has been little research exploring their affective roots. I also identify a fourth response that temporarily interrupts students’ negative affective trajectories. I provide a theoretical and practical understanding of this productive response, which I call hope. I conclude by suggesting how teachers might encourage and sustain hope.

In his 2005 CCCC’s address, chair Douglas Hesse named two categories of writing—obliged and self-sponsored. Obliged writing, compelled by schools or jobs, rewards writers with grades and paychecks. Self-sponsored writing—composed for civic, personal, and what Hesse calls “belletristic reasons”—usually offers no material compensation. Yet people freely choose to write, leading Hesse to exclaim, “My goodness. That people will write even when not obliged!” Self-sponsored writing, he suggests, arises from the writer’s “welling desire to write oneself into the world by creating textual artifacts” (351). Hesse’s description highlights self-sponsored writing’s affects—a web of sensation and emotion (“welling desire”), relationships (“write oneself into the world”), and material objects (“textual artifacts”) that provokes humans to voluntarily write.

Some who study affect define the word in terms of emotion, preference, or attitude (Johnson and Krase; Lawson). Such research tells us that students like self-sponsored extracurricular writing more than they like obliged school writing (Addison and McGee). But there is more to learn about the affective quality of students’ writing experiences. If we limit affect to emotions, we overlook its more complex, messy, and ultimately interesting dimensions (Nelson). A cadre of writing studies scholars—including Marilyn Cooper, Laura Micciche, Jenny Edbauer Rice, and Thomas Rickert—have used contemporary affect theory to understand relationships between writers and other bodies/objects as they move and become; touch and disturb; influence, alter, shape, and entice each other. Yet in 2019 Kevin Leander and Christian Ehret described our field’s affect scholarship as “clearly still nascent” (13). This essay contributes to that nascent momentum by using affect theory as a framework for understanding writing and how we might recruit “welling desire” in and out of writing classrooms.

I report on an IRB-approved study of high school student writers enrolled in a college preparatory writing workshop. My study reveals that young writers’ affects coalesce around different writing activities in discernible ways. As we might assume, participants in my study are more affectively drawn to writing they freely choose than to the obligatory writing they do in school and in the summer workshop. Yet the students in my study are also aware that their aversion to school-obliged writing conflicts with their teachers’ beliefs that academic writing{1} skill is prerequisite to success in college and in life. I call this mismatch between the students’ affect and their teachers’ ideology affective rupture. Similar to what Arlie Russell Hochschild describes as “the pinch between ‘what I do feel’ and ‘what I should feel’” (57), affective rupture introduces a tension that students must negotiate. Teachers will likely recognize the strategies students use to address this rupture—downplaying their writing ability, gritting their way through writing assignments, or adopting an apathetic attitude toward academic writing. Every semester, I had seen first-year composition students enact these same patterns. Like many writing scholars, I had interpreted these behaviors through an emotional lens, not fully appreciating their relational and embodied roots.

Three participants in my study enacted a different and more positive response to affective rupture, albeit mostly unwittingly. They described moments of “welling desire”—spontaneous, temporary suspensions of their usual negative affect toward in-school writing. In interviews, these students highlighted the material dimensions of these experiences, pointing to bodies, objects, and physical sensations. I call these embodied responses hope, which, following Ben Anderson, I theorize as an interruption of negative affective trajectories. While neither the students nor I articulated the idea of hope during the interviews, I later came to believe that physical and embodied hope can be a powerful antidote to the affective burden obliged writing imposes on many students.

This essay proceeds in three parts. After laying a theoretical foundation for affect and hope, I evaluate the three patterns of student behavior and attitude described above, exploring the affective implications of each. I then provide examples of hopeful affective responses. Finally, I revisit the patterns of student response and suggest how teachers might help students replace unproductive patterns by noticing and dwelling more intensely in embodied manifestations of hope.

My purpose is to help composition teachers understand the affective histories students bring into our classrooms. Appreciating the fullness of students’ writing affect can help teachers guide students through the new literacy landscape of college and ensure that “the [college] classroom becomes contiguous with other places of comfort and becomes a place where students feel invited and authorized to speak” (Gallegos). Additionally, by attending to hopeful affect, teachers may help students develop productive and generative responses to obliged writing tasks. We know that generative emotions—those that enhance a writer’s relationship with writing—have long-term, positive impacts on students’ writing development (Driscoll and Powell). My research, which focuses on embodiment and relationships, suggests that hopeful affect may confer similar long-term benefits.

Theorizing Affect

Affect theory resembles the phenomenon it describes—a stable-only-for-now assemblage of concepts pulled from philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, social sciences, and the humanities. Spinoza named the theory’s central principle: a body’s capacity to affect and be affected by other bodies/things. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari located affect within assemblages and emphasized its virtual (becoming) quality, while Brian Massumi explored the affect-emotion relationship. Eve Sedgwick, Elspeth Probyn, Lauren Berlant, and Sara Ahmed linked affect to everyday cultural, political, and social experiences. And this is, at best, a partial list of scholars whose ideas comprise affect theory.

For my research, I define affect as an ongoing change in capacity that emerges in encounters between bodies, objects, things, ideas, and other bodies. Affect is how bodies and objects provoke and respond, resonate and repulse, unite and dissolve, blend and bond, turn toward and turn away, and everything in between. Both conscious and preconscious, affect can register as sensations, impulses, feelings, movements, dispositions, expectations, swells, and shocks—or, in Kathleen Stewart’s succinct language, “something that feels like something” (2).

Like other writing studies scholars, I use affect theory to foreground writing as an embodied activity that ineluctably entangles writers in ecologies of material, discursive, and ideational forces and objects.

Affect causes writing bodies to evaluate and adjust their proximity to those objects. When we evaluate an object positively, we express that evaluation by “turn[ing] toward” the object. Alternatively, “those things we do not like we move away from” (Ahmed, “Happy” 31). People establish individual and collective patterns of affective movement—together turning toward and away from certain objects. We are, Gries notes, “susceptible to affective contagions” (63). Affect’s social dimension can be illustrated with psychological and physiological responses; for example, smiles, yawns, and blushes move between people in ways that are (in the case of the latter two) largely beyond an individual’s control. Yet we can think of blushing and yawning as involuntary affects without entirely foreclosing on consciousness. A blush colors our cheeks because we register a social situation as embarrassing, not just because the sympathetic nervous system dictates it.

Kenneth Burke notes the connection between affect and “acting-together” in his doctrine of consubstantiality: “In acting together, men have common sensations ... that make them consubstantial” (21). Thus, the social quality of affect can “place the individual in a circuit of feeling and response” that is shared by many people (Hemmings 552). Conversely, individuals can find themselves outside shared circuits of feeling and response or drawn to alternative, less popular circuits. Ahmed explores the consequences of being outside shared circuits of feeling and response, arguing that if we move away from things that others move toward, we alienate ourselves from the affective community. Ahmed refers to this as becoming “affect aliens.” Examples of affect aliens include an unhappy bride on her wedding day or a child who experiences unsettling sensations at the family dinner table, thereby being figuratively “unseated by the table of happiness” (“Feminist Killjoys”). In this essay, I use the term affective rupture to describe a similar disharmony, between students’ aversion to academic writing and larger social beliefs about the value of academic writing. In this affective rupture, a student’s individual affect—cognitive, emotional, and embodied—alienates them from a powerful and socially sanctioned affective circuit.

Theorizing Hope

As an affective sensation moves through a body, it folds into additional affective relations that sap or swell the body’s capacity to be further affected. Thus, all affects produce “a change in which powers to affect and be affected are addressable by a next event and how readily addressable they are” (Massumi, Parables 15). Ben Anderson argues that affective capacities typically move along trajectories of enhancement and increase or of diminishment and decrease. Positive affect augments our capacity to experience positive affect in the future, while negative affect pulls the body into a cycle of declining capacity.

Yet Anderson also suggests it is possible to interrupt affective trajectories of diminishment. This disruption represents “a point of hazard in between the vectors of joy and sadness, or enhancement and diminishment” that Anderson names hope (Becoming 742).{2} He locates hope in moments when an affective encounter breaks a trajectory of diminishment by “anticipat[ing] that something indeterminate has not-yet become” (Becoming 733). The insertion of possibility interrupts a body’s diminishing affect and diminishing power to act.

The idea of hope as an affective capacity complicates traditional cognitive models of hope, which dominate psychology and have been used by education and writing studies scholars (Rose and Sieben; Sieben). Cognitive models posit that hope is thinking about a desired outcome, thinking about strategies to accomplish the outcome, and thinking about one’s ability to initiate and sustain action leading to the outcome (Snyder). Anderson locates hope more expansively in the affective intensities that make bodies receptive (even fleetingly) to the possibility of change. Anderson’s hope does not require an about-face but only “a relation of suspension that discloses the future as open” (Becoming 747). Since hope signals a potential becoming, it can emerge repeatedly, intermittently, or only occasionally without losing its hopeful quality (Massumi, Navigating).

Ahmed’s idea about movement and Anderson’s idea about fluctuating capacity help explain why student writers turn voluntarily and repeatedly to self-sponsored, extra-curricular writing. Such writing provokes affects of “welling desire,” which in turn provoke a positive change in students’ sense of their potential as writers. That change is hope. This relationship between affect, capacity, and hope has pedagogical implications for obliged in-school writing as well.

Studying Affect

I researched the affective experiences of students enrolled in a summer writing workshop. The workshop is a collaboration between a public school district and a large research university, with faculty from both district high schools and the university’s College of Education. Held on the university campus, the workshop curriculum emphasizes college preparation, especially for students underrepresented in higher education. Many workshop participants have a background of limited success with academic writing, having failed a language arts class or scored below proficient on state-mandated proficiency tests. Still, most plan to attend college, often as the first in their family to do so.

In recruitment sessions and throughout the duration of the workshop, faculty communicate a clear message: skill in academic writing leads to success in college, which leads to economic and social wellbeing. This assertion is hardly novel. Many scholars in our field position writing as the gateway to college and career success (P. Anderson et al.; Bangert Drowns et al.; Smith). Political philosopher Michael Sandel notes that a belief in higher education as the engine of economic success and social status permeates our national rhetoric, so much so that Sandel calls the corresponding contempt for those without college degrees “the last acceptable prejudice” (81). This powerful and pervasive ethic of credentialism—combined with the workshop’s explicit messaging—may accentuate the affective rupture I describe in this essay.

I observed students during the two-week workshop and conducted thirty-minute semi-structured interviews with thirty-one students. The findings in this essay come from interview recordings, transcripts, and field notes. Themes and patterns related to affect and embodiment emerged as I coded the data.{3} Although I began each interview by explaining my research and assuring participants their involvement was voluntary and in no way connected to their teacher or grade, the data reveals that the workshop’s messaging and my identity as a university writing teacher and researcher influenced students’ responses. For example, as I concluded one interview, a student said with obvious relief, “I thought I was in trouble!” Her belief that I could get her “in trouble” must have impacted our conversation.

The idea of affective rupture emerged when I asked students to tell me about the writing they did in and outside of school. Despite their uneven experiences with academic writing and the availability of multiple recreational options, nearly 93% of study participants pursued some form of regular self-sponsored writing. Outside of school, they wrote plays, songs, poems, novels, stories, “snippets” of stories, character sketches, letters, email, journal and diary entries, orders for takeout, instructions for solving a Rubik’s cube, applications for camp, and fan fiction. One student—an outlier—said she wrote argument essays outside of school. In school, students primarily wrote expository or argumentative essays, though a few had taken a creative writing course. Not surprisingly, then, differences between obliged and self-sponsored writing concern matters of both agency and genre. But these students also described different affects associated with writing in the workshop or school and writing on their own.

Self-sponsored writing appealed to students in ways that school-based writing did not. Some students complained that school “kills” any desire to write. Remembering happy experiences in a creative writing class, a few suggested that all writing classes should teach creative genres. But one student believed that, no matter the genre, school writing is full of “negative energy and pressure to advance because you won’t make it in the world if you don’t make it in school.” The linking of in-school writing with “making it in the world” was a common theme across the interviews. Most students seemed to accept that obliged writing fits Ahmed’s criteria for a “happy object”—something that people associate with happiness and success (Happy 41). Most believed that academic writing skill leads to success in college, rewarding employment, and wealth, and they could rehearse a network of positive beliefs gathered around objects (degrees), practices (jobs), and states of being (prosperity) promising happiness. But they also confessed that their emotions and embodied response turned them away from school writing. This created a condition of rupture in which students’ affect was out of sync with the workshop’s beliefs, values, and attitudes.

Students attempted to resolve the tension of this affective rupture using three behavior patterns I describe below. While writing teachers may be familiar with these behaviors, as a field we may have overlooked their affective origins. We have not understood them as strategies for addressing affective rupture.

1. Disavowing Writerly Capacity

Many students justified affective rupture by downplaying or expressing ambivalence about their writing capacity. An 11th-grade student said she “disliked” everything about writing because she felt she was “bad” at it. In fact, I found only two students who did not qualify their writing capacity in some way. A handful of students used unqualified positive language, but only to talk about specific writing proficiencies. Such trait-specific confidence included the ability to “create voice,” “hit emotions,” “get a point across,” or “make [a reader] feel how I feel.”

In contrast, most students exhibited marked ambivalence about their writing capacity. Acknowledging some skill or progress, they were quick to point out their weaknesses as well—often in the same sentence. Typical of this pattern, one student said, “I feel like I have definitely improved, but I still feel like I am not a great writer.” Students often pointed to comparisons with others, even though the workshop encouraged all students to believe in their writing ability. On the workshop’s opening day, a faculty member welcomed students by calling them “young writing scholars.” Within the first five minutes, students had chanted in unison “As a young writing scholar I will...” three times, and they repeated this statement of collective capacity throughout the two-week workshop. Yet students’ intrapersonal sense of capacity—their own evaluation of their ability and their interpretation of how others perceive their ability—seemed more complex, and comparisons played a key role in what students believed about themselves as writers (Bartlett). As one student said, “The only reason that I feel like a bad writer is that I read other people’s essays and I see how good they are compared to mine.”

Most importantly, students seemed to downplay their capacity in response to affective rupture—that is, to explain or justify their affective orientation away from academic writing. One student said:

When I think of myself as a writer, I think that I am ok. I am absolutely not the best because when I read other people’s writings such as my friend, I think, “Wow she is such a good writer. I am definitely not as good as her.” But I also see essays that are so awful that I am grateful for my writing ability. I have read some really bad essays and I feel bad for whoever wrote it. I don’t hate writing but I also don’t love it.

The writer makes typical moves—qualifying capacity and comparing self to others—before suddenly turning to affect, implying a connection between their sense of low capacity and their dull affect.

In some cases, downplaying capacity may be a coping mechanism and motivation strategy—what Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor call defensive pessimism—that helps writers prepare for and simultaneously try to avoid failure. Hedging about capacity can temper expectations (their own and others’) for their writing. For example, some students claimed to be math-science people rather than writers. This disclaimer may afford them some affective relief in the writing classroom, but it does not help them improve as writers.

For many students, however, disavowing writerly capacity may be less a conscious strategy than an affective consequence (i.e., a response to the discomfort of affective rupture) that imposes additional affective consequences. We have likely seen these additional affects in our writing classrooms—boredom, frustration, and lack of engagement, energy, or motivation. Students’ disavowals effectively limit what their affective bodies can become by establishing what they are not capable of becoming—that is, a body affectively drawn to writing.

2. Willing a Positive Response

In a less common pattern of response to affective rupture, writers sometimes suppressed their immediate affective response—what they naturally felt—by willing the affect they thought they should have. I do something similar when I order kale salads even though I don’t like kale. Like grit with a distinct affective inflection, this approach is both personal (I convince myself that I enjoy eating healthful food) and relational (I convince others that I am, in fact, a happy health-conscious eater). Thus, this approach resembles what Hochschild calls “surface acting,” or pretending to feel (and therefore act) counter to our spontaneous affects (37). Students demonstrated the inherent relational nature of this approach by couching their resolve in affirmations of accepted values and beliefs about academic writing. For example, one student said:

Writing has never been my favorite thing to do, I always have struggled with it, so the answer to your question is: I don’t really like writing. But that’s why I’m here. I want to like writing because I know that I’m going to have to use writing skills everywhere I go especially in college.

This student’s process for addressing affective rupture includes first admitting an affective orientation away from writing, then acknowledging a “struggle” with writing, and finally determining to “like” writing and to gain skills that will (according to commonly held beliefs) ensure a successful future. Another student focused primarily on what she saw as a necessary correlation between identity and writing, saying that true writers “must” enjoy all writing genres. Her emphasis of the modal verb underscored the imperative nature of her statement.

A final example comes from my conversation with Olivia, whose interview I return to below.{4} As Olivia discussed her reasons for attending the workshop, her answer included typical kale-response features. She acknowledged her affective rupture, negatively evaluated her capacity, stated her intentionality, and affirmed the workshop’s orientation:

Why I came [to the workshop] is because I hate writing—and it, it, it’s never clicked with the way my brain works...So I came here to kind of learn how to organize my thoughts...And it’s so, so necessary for the schools I want to go to in the future. It’s really, really crucial that I learn to write an essay for scholarships and for general admissions.

Here Olivia wills her affective orientation to align with that of the workshop. She repeatedly emphasizes “organization” and “structure” as important elements of in-school writing, and she seems to see these constraints as ways to discipline both her writing and her affective tendencies.

This approach requires students to pretend an affective orientation that their bodies do not naturally follow. The strategy resembles positive psychology that privileges the “deployment of strength and virtue” as the “road to the good life” (Seligman and Pawelski 161). Without denying the value of positive psychology or discounting research linking optimism and self-efficacy with academic success (Pajares et al.), I suggest that suppressing or disciplining affect may be difficult for students to maintain.

3. Adopting Apathy

In a final response pattern, some students simply opted out of grand narratives about obliged writing, not necessarily rejecting the workshop’s orientation to writing but questioning its status or its relevance for particular futures. These were outliers, however. Most students upheld the party line that school writing improves life outcomes, which is not surprising given the context of my research—situated within the workshop’s transparent goal of encouraging writing development and college matriculation, framed by my identity as a writing studies scholar.

Yet some students demonstrated ambivalence about in-school writing, expressing doubts about its worth or limiting its relevance to school settings and narrowly defined workplaces. This group of students seemed to believe that writing’s importance, in the words of one student, “depends [on] what you want your life to be.” While most students accepted writing’s value for college attendance, they were less convinced about its value for a career. This limited instrumentality view of writing is evident in one student’s response: “You do need writing to, like, further in college, which gets you, like, higher in life in today’s society, but I don’t know how after that. Like when you’re sitting in your career.” Many students said writing’s marketplace value depends on one’s job, and some identified careers in which writing might matter most: medicine, journalism, politics and government, psychology, and (surprisingly) firefighting.

Despite their ambivalence, students hesitated to altogether reject writing’s social good status. My conversation with Teresa, a confident and bubbly Latina student who listed her hobbies as learning about cultures and languages and “bringing humans all together,” illustrates this. Saying she came to the workshop for the free pizza, she described her self-sponsored writing with enthusiasm, calling it a “feeling” that is “just like flowing to get yourself into a peaceful state of mind.” This feeling does not extend to her obliged academic writing, which she described as “structure, like, you need to have this and this.” Still Teresa had a hard time dismissing academic writing’s value completely. When asked how important it might be to her future, she answered:

I feel like [academic writing] could help. I mean obviously if you know how to write a pretty good essay. I mean, it would, like, just say you’re doing a college, like, application, and you know how to write. You know how to present yourself, like, in a way, like you know how to sell yourself basically.... But I feel like, I don’t know. It’s, it’s complicated because some people, they know how to write, but they don’t know how to talk. Do you get me? I don’t know. I guess it would kind of be accurate that writing does get you, but actions get you there too.

Teresa’s repeated hesitations and equivocations, her assertion that “it’s complicated,” and her appeal to her audience—“Do you get me?”—all hint that questioning in-school writing’s value is not an easy stance for her to take. On the surface, adopting apathy seems a facile response, requiring none of the “strength and virtue” of a grit approach. But as Teresa demonstrates, this last strategy carries significant costs for students who must continually justify their affective withdrawal in the face of ongoing social endorsement of obliged school writing. Given that affective rupture is a powerful and embodied response to writing, adopting apathy may be, ironically, the most difficult strategy to implement.

Hope

The three patterns above emerged in the data as prominent responses to affective rupture—the “gap between what [students] do feel and what [they think they] should feel” (Ahmed Feminist). But I also saw instances of hope—fleeting moments of pleasurable affect that temporarily halted a student’s habitual negative affective trajectory. Moments of hope are important not because they ineluctably lead to changed writers, but because they offer students and teachers opportunities to imagine an improved future within existing capacities and affects. Furthermore, as Anderson (Becoming) emphasizes, hope always arises in a context of diminishment. So even—and perhaps especially—students who have complicated relationships with in-school writing can experience hope. I saw hope when an encounter opened, however briefly, a student’s sense that writing could be different than they historically or presently experienced it. Because these examples come from audio recordings of interviews, much of the students’ embodied affect in the moment of narration is lost. I can hear changes in vocal rhythm, tempo, and inflection, but I don’t see—except in my memory—the blushes, nervous smiles, or animated gestures that accompanied their stories. Those affects are important, of course, but more important to my research are the affects students described experiencing in the moment of composing—intensities of embodiment, movement, and relationships that open positive possibilities for writing. The interview recordings and transcripts capture these affects.

For example, Sarah was a self-proclaimed “creative writing person.” Currently writing a novel, she had previously attended a creative writing camp at a nearby liberal-arts college and participated in Nanowrimo.{5} She spoke excitedly about her novel writing, describing a state of welling desire: the “best feeling” of having “your thoughts and your hands just, like, flowing at the same time ... and all of a sudden you’re done with two thousand words, and, like, I want to keep going.” Her affective pleasure mirrors Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow”—an optimal experience “so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake” (71). In Sarah’s telling, flow is the movement of her body (“hands”) and mind (“thoughts”) so intimately synchronized that time falls away.

In contrast, when I asked Sarah about in-school writing, she confessed it is “crazy important,” but she painted a bleak picture of the experience, repeatedly emphasizing its “repetitive and routine” nature. School writing is a “chore,” she said, “something I just want to get done and do fast and get out of the way.” But as she talked about writing an essay for the workshop, she described a moment that I later interpreted as hope:

And it’s like, “Okay here’s my thesis, here’s one point, here’s a supporting quote, here’s why it works, here’s my ending to that paragraph.” And then over and over again. So it feels really repetitive. And it’s nice sometimes, if I get lucky, and it’s like, “Oh my gosh, what about this idea?” that you can explain. So that’s like a little rush, but for the most part it’s just kind of boring, repetitive.

The “little rush” Sarah described punctures an affective trajectory of boredom and disengagement. A “lucky” thought—“What about this idea?”—breaks the “really repetitive” movement she typically experiences. This break, this fleeting arrest of her usual movement, provokes her little rush. If sustained, it might allow her to experience flow. But the rush passes so quickly in her telling (and seemingly in her experience), that it appears easier for her to focus on the negative affect surrounding it. I too initially focused on Sarah’s negative affect. I only noticed the interjection of hope after reading and listening to the interview many times. Easily missed, Sarah’s hope is nevertheless noteworthy given her overall affective orientation.

Or consider Olivia, a student I introduced earlier. Olivia attended the district’s performing arts high school, and she spoke with the practiced air of a stage actor, gesturing theatrically. Even though Olivia planned a career in musical theater, she called in-school writing “crucial” to her future and said she joined the workshop to solve her academic writing woes. Her account of writing her essay for the workshop included this:

I wrote in cursive all that I wanted to say, and then I typed all of what I wrote in cursive. And then it kind of started getting fun because I have two pages right now of stuff that I could have said, but it just didn’t fit. And so it was kind of like a puzzle of, like, do I need this? Is this necessary? Is this a point I want to prove? ... So that experience was really cool.

Olivia highlights embodiment and movement: two physically different modes of writing involving two different writing objects followed by the sensation of playful movement, which she imaginatively likens to doing a puzzle (a third object). Her rapid-fire questions convey the exhilaration she experienced when her writing became game-like. In that hopeful moment, Olivia manifested little of her previous antipathy toward writing or doubts about her writing ability. Instead, this affective encounter with her text provoked a profound, and “really cool,” pause in her usual trajectory of diminishment.

Two final examples of hope come from my interview with Francisca, a petite, Latina student who spoke with singular intensity. She had come to the workshop to remedy the poor grades she had received in language arts classes, and she emphasized her desire to learn the “structure” of academic essays. Saying that she believes in-school writing is “very important,” she admitted that she is not drawn to it. Outside of school, however, Francisca wrote enthusiastically as a way of “getting [her] feelings on paper,” and she called her extracurricular writing a “relief.” The differences in her affective experiences negatively impacted the texts she produced in school. “You can tell the feeling of a paper,” she said, “[It’s] like, ‘Okay I had to write this because it’s a grade.’”

Despite her discouraging academic record, her lack of academic writing confidence, and her flat affective experiences in school, Francisca sprinkled her interview with moments of hope. I saw the first spark when she narrated the events of waiting for an acceptance letter from the workshop.

And I would go check the mail every single day. And it was like, “Oh my god, it’s not here.” And then one day during school in one of my classes ... my teacher comes and she gives me a letter and I’m like, “What is this?” And then I read “You’ve been accepted for the camp,” and tears came out, and I was just so excited. I even called my mom, and I’m like, “I made it into the camp!” And she was like, “Oh my god, I’m so proud!”

While Francisca evaluated and interpreted this moment as an emotion—“I was just so excited”—the affects of her experience are multiple and layered. They include a bodily response, which she attributes agency independent of her intentionality by saying that “tears came out” (not “I cried”). The relational nature of her affect is also clear in the phone call with her mother; their matching exclamatory sentences suggest an intensification of affect as it moves between their bodies. The encounter between Francisca, the letter, and her mother reflects Francisca’s desire to improve as an academic writer. As importantly, the affect she describes suggests that in this moment both she and her mother feel this is possible.

Francisca narrated a second moment of hope when she described revising her paper in the workshop. A teacher suggested she work with Jenny, another student, to make one section of her draft more concise. Explaining the collaboration process, Francisca said:

And so I was like, “Okay.” And I was like reading and Jenny was like getting out important things that she thought should go in the paragraph. And then it’s like we both started thinking we should put this first. “Oh no wait, let’s change this.” And then, that’s how we got to, we had a quote and my story in one small paragraph after having five paragraphs.

Following up on this account, I asked Francisca how it felt to work through the revision process. Francisca answered, “It felt really good,” and then elaborated on the experience she had just described, this time offering a detailed play-by-play that revealed a particularly hopeful moment:

And Jenny started giving me her comments.
And then I was like, “Look this is the question [the teacher] told me to ask, so I’m trying to make it shorter.”
And she’s like, “Well how about you try this?”
And then I’m like, “Okay.”
And then we both started working on it and then building on it.
And then, like, oh my god! There it is!

In her second telling, Francisca described an emergent moment that included imagined embodied sensations of movement (“building”) and vision (“There it is!”). Francisca’s linguistic choices punctuate her narrative of this affective moment that, itself, punctuated her lived experience. In lines 2-4, Francisca, like most teenagers, uses the word like in its quotative sense, as something similar to said. But in line 6, her use of like communicates “factuality and counterexpectation”—another usage young people like Francisca have mastered (McWhorter). This second use of like conveys the message, “And then—contrary to what you or I would expect—there it is!” The slight pause before and after this like (which I represent with commas) syncopates the sentence, drawing rhythmic emphasis to her surprised exclamation, “Oh my god! There it is!” Her telling thus mirrors the affective shock she experienced. As when receiving the acceptance letter, Francisca’s affect in this moment abruptly breaks her accustomed trajectory of diminishing affect and capacity. In this dynamic encounter between bodies and texts, hope erupts and temporarily counters the accustomed affects that have made Francisca a diffident academic writer.

As Sarah, Olivia, and Francisca illustrate, hope is not dependent on textual results. All three students foregrounded their experiences rather than their texts. Even Francisca, who was clearly delighted with her revised paragraph, situated her hope in a description of the experience, not a description of how the text changed. Hope opens experiential possibility but does not portend (or rely on) improved writing outcomes. Nor does it signal lasting change in students’ affective orientations. Rather, hope offers an opening to a writing future that is different from a writing past or present. Becoming hopeful in affective moments may rearrange the present trajectory of students’ affective capacity in ways that allow them to be hopeful writers in the future (Anderson, Becoming). If students can sustain hope, they may be more willing and persistent academic writers.

Implications for Teaching

My research adds to our understanding of students’ affective experiences with obliged and self-sponsored writing. As Hesse suggested, I found that welling desire is often restricted to students’ experiences with self-sponsored writing. In contrast, obliged writing rarely provokes pleasurable affects, and thus students’ in-school writing experiences do not align with larger narratives about academic writing’s importance. If students were not compelled to compose in school, they could ignore the resulting tension or affective rupture. Required to write in classrooms, however, students in this study navigated the rupture in patterned ways. The attitudes and behaviors I have described are likely familiar to composition teachers, yet my research interprets those behaviors as responses to the discomfort of affective rupture. While these behaviors soothe students’ affective unease, they are unlikely to produce confident academic writers. Acknowledging the affective source of these behaviors can help us imagine more productive remedies for the problem of affective rupture, and I offer some pedagogical suggestions in that regard.

First, I recommend making affect visible in the classroom. Even if affect cannot be fully captured in language, the affect of writing—how minds and bodies perceive, respond to, resonate with, interpret, and evaluate other body/objects while writing—can be part of classroom conversations. We can encourage students to reflect on their writing experiences, asking where do you write? What things do you interact with while writing? What do you notice? What do you think? What do you feel? What happens to your body? Noticing, describing, naming, and reflecting on affect can help students understand why they are drawn toward and away from different kinds of writing. It can give students and teachers vocabulary for discussing affect and evaluating affective responses. Additionally, recognizing and reflecting on affect may also help students challenge their automatic interpretations of affect, allowing them to encounter the experience “in a different way” (Lynch 513). For example, the student who evaluated the repetitive nature of writing as “boring” may come to interpret (and appreciate) writing’s repetitive nature as a framework that makes possible unexpected affective thrills, just as the thrill of musical syncopation relies on a repetitive beat.

Reflecting on affect can also open critical conversations about how students address affective rupture. For example, we may ask students to differentiate between affective discomfort and lack of capacity and thereby challenge their downplaying of writing skill. Reminding students that writing requires investments of time and practice, we might ask them to reflect on things they are good at and to describe those activities using the questions posed above. We can invite students to reflect on how they developed skill in areas other than writing and how changes in capacity impacted their affective orientations.

Students who force themselves to “like” writing despite negative affective experiences can also benefit from identifying and reflecting on affect. Rather than assuming obliged writing will always be grin-and-bear-it, they might identify aspects of writing (in or out of school) they find affectively enjoyable. As teachers, we should consider the affects our assignment are likely to provoke, but we might also solicit students’ help in designing assignments that include elements they associate with positive affect. Highlighting the differences between self-sponsored and obliged writing affect may also help students recognize that obliged writing provokes unique affects that many writers find productive, if not pleasurable (Micciche).

Students prone to opt out of the grand narrative about academic writing can consider whether this strategy is a response to an accurate assessment of writing’s role in their future or a way of justifying their affective orientation away from academic writing. The goal of making affect visible is not to convince students to change their affective responses or their beliefs, but to help them understand affect’s complexity. We should honor students’ affective experiences, but neither we nor they need to accept them as reliable indicators of individual capacity or writing’s value.

Finally, we can help students notice and name moments of hope, acknowledging these as openings to better, yet-to-be writing experiences. Because hope emerges in the context of “specific diminishments,” inexperienced writers may feel hope more frequently than more accomplished writers, even if they don’t appreciate these momentary changes in affect (Anderson, Becoming 743). Thus, hope, when recognized, may be especially valuable in basic writing and first-year writing classes, and teachers can play a key role in validating and nurturing hopeful moments. We can share the idea of hope in our classrooms and invite students to look for it and dwell in it more intensely.

In this regard, I regret that I came to understand affective rupture and hope while analyzing data, long after I had left the research site. As I review the interview transcripts, I see that rather than acknowledging the affective importance of these moments, I let them pass, responding with comments like “interesting” and moving to my next prepared question. I wish, instead, that I had asked Sarah more about her “little rush.” I might have said, “That’s a cool experience! How could you make that little rush last longer?” Or, “Wow! It would be great if that happened more often. Can you think of an assignment that would make those ‘rushes’ more likely?” I wish I had responded to Olivia’s writing-puzzle comparison by saying, “That sounds like revision, which is a really important part of writing. The puzzle metaphor you used is a great way to think about revision. Can we share that with the class?”{6} And I could have told Francisca: “Your story about being accepted to the workshop shows me that you and your mom know you can become a strong academic writer.” By acknowledging hope, I might have further interrupted the affects of diminishment that feed writing despair and thereby helped these students nourish more permanent hopeful affect. Because my understanding of hope emerged after the study ended, I was unable to check my interpretations with students or ask them to consider the impact these moments had on them. Future research could provide more insight into students’ understanding of affect and the role hopeful affect plays in their writing lives.

Jane Bennett notes that while “subintentional forces within the self” can work against good intentions, “it might be possible to work on some of these unruly elements by tactical means—to render them, for example, more amenable to a generous disposition” (155). Nurturing hope may be one of the “tactical means” that helps students develop a more generous disposition toward themselves as writers. Paying attention to hopeful moments can reorganize affective relations, creating a “disposition of hopefulness” that increases an individual’s capacity to act (Anderson, “Becoming” 744). I do not pretend that talking about affect or noticing bursts of hope will magically transform writers. Writing development requires sustained motivation and practice over long periods. Still, reflecting on affect may help students address affective rupture in ways that reshape their orientation to writing and inspire them to persist as writers. Likewise, celebrating hopeful moments may shift a writer’s affective trajectory, producing additional moments of hope that eventually make writing “a hopeful site of experience” (Anderson, Becoming 743).

Notes

1. Like David Bartholomae, I use “academic writing” as a synonym for in-school writing. Regardless of genre or form, it is writing done under the supervision of a teacher or writing a student “can’t not do” (63). (Return to text.)

2. For Anderson, “joy and sadness...do not necessarily function on the conventional axes of happy—sad or pleasant—unpleasant, nor refer to a state that is possessed by a subject. Sadness is, rather, a name given to the affect insofar as it involves a diminution in the power of acting, whereas joy is a name given to the affect insofar as it involves an increase in the power of acting” (Encountering 80). (Return to text.)

3. For more information about my methods and coding, see Williams. (Return to text.)

4. All student names are pseudonyms. (Return to text.)

5. National Novel Writing Month https://nanowrimo.org/. (Return to text.)

6. See Nancy Sommers for the value of adopting students’ language in the composition classroom (8). (Return to text.)

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