Creative Confidence and Design is Storytelling Emotional Remix

 

A key aspect of both Ellen Lupton’s “Act 2” from Design is Storytelling (2017) and the “Spark” chapter of Tom and David Kelley’s Creative Confidence (2013) is emotion. Each text delves deeply into how emotion impacts how users perceive and interpret their experiences. For Lupton, good experiences move beyond ease of use. Instead, the best experiences make the user feel something positive, even if the arc of an individual event has variations in the level of satisfaction or dissonance at different points. Provided the outcome of the entire experience creates a sense of positivity, satisfaction, or wellbeing, temporary dips in enjoyability do not create an adverse sense of happiness with the overarching event. The Kelley brothers zero in on a similar theme by dredging the possibilities that emerge from sustained, highly intentional exploration of not only users’ understood needs, but of the needs even they may not recognize as issues. For them, it is fine to brainstorm what we problems we may know or even think might exist, but without really asking sprawling, widely cast questions, we cannot imagine how many problems exist but go unspoken.

In reading these chapters and considering how I might use them for my own students, I struggled to find a way to develop a means of facilitating my students’ empathy levels. I think this is mostly because of the discipline I teach, which encompasses various kinds of writing at the college level. Depending on what kind(s) of writing a course entails, we may read and respond to others’ writings, or we might model our own projects after others’ work. We could critique or editorialize or argue with claims. In some classes we might experiment with how flow would have changed if an author had been as concise as Hemingway or as verbose as Faulkner. My writers might dig into any number of aspects of composing, but we always consider how our writing choices affect the reader.

The challenge here is that more often than not, when I have writers consider their readers, I also ask students to take stock of their rhetorical situations. That is, they think about their audience…are they professionals? Academics? Children? Friends? The general public? Family? And what are they writing and what is its purpose? A note? An email? An essay? Or maybe it is a legal brief or a technical paper. Perhaps it is a research article or a poem. What about genre? And we must think about the setting in which our work is to be consumed. Clearly, thinking about how emotion feeds into my students’ work is about as clear as mud because even when we are focusing on a given type of writing course, every student’s writing topic will be different and will have different emotional considerations because learners devise their own writing topics and choose supporting materials that I guide but do not control. It is a very different kind of writing assignment from many in middle and high school, where most writing prompts provide clear boundaries and may restrict writers to a specific text or texts. How do I create a tool that can help the breadth of my writers to effectively build empathy?

I think one option I might be able to use in most writing courses, regardless of which variables exist for given foci, is to make students experience what it is like to understand a text for which they have limited or no prior knowledge or experience. This would likely be at the beginning of a semester or unit. It would require students to read a series of three assignments that discuss topics that are likely unfamiliar and which have varied levels of clarity and explanation. After students completed the readings, I would ask them to participate a survey in which I refer to specific sections of the reading. Instead of asking only what the author is saying, I would expand the questions to do something I usually try to get students not to do in much of their writing. Many of my courses cover professional and academic writing…the kind where we ask what students think, not what they feel. In this case, I would ask them to tell me how they feel not about the reading’s topic, but how the way the reading explained its ideas made them feel. For example, in a 100-level course, it is very difficult for most students to follow a researched argument. Few students have the prior experience of reading many scholarly, peer-reviewed articles from a range of disciplines before they start college, so we need to teach them how to read these kinds of materials for specific writing purposes. I usually begin with articles that are easier to follow and increase the readings’ complexity as students become more adept at navigating these kinds of articles. However, if I were to assign brief but complex articles that are hard to understand, students would feel frustration, which I could then use as a means of helping them recognize how their rhetorical choices in their writing impacts a reader emotionally. The articles would be selected to help students recognize how they felt while trying to read complex material when the authors were clear, less clear, and very unclear. The surveys would depend on the course focus, but generally, I think I could help students make the connection to their readers’ emotional responses to the ways writers put their explanations together with a set of assignments such as this.

To be 100% clear, I am in no way advocating for assignments that routinely force students to feel frustration just to get them to feel a negative emotion about a bunch of readings with no support from me. I see that as abusive and would never do that to my learners. Ever. However, I do think a few short readings that produce different levels of discomfort could be helpful in getting fledgling writers to better understand their users’---their readers’---emotional responses to different composing practices. I think with substantial debriefing afterward and consistent guidance after the experience and throughout the semester could be helpful for these writers. By placing them “into their readers’ shoes” for just a short time would increase their empathy as writers who compose for readers with different rhetorical needs.