For decades, we have rightly celebrated writing as a profound intellectual pursuit. We teach our students to think critically, organise their ideas logically, and craft sophisticated arguments. Indeed, writing is often seen as the quintessential representation of thought. However, this strong emphasis on cognition, while valuable, has inadvertently created a ‘blind spot’ in how we understand and teach writing: the role of emotion.
As teachers, we readily acknowledge that emotions motivate our students. Yet, the prevailing belief often holds that feelings have little to do with the actual process of making writing. Drawing on insights from Alice G. Brand’s The Why of Cognition: Emotion and the Writing Process¹, this article argues that a truly complete psychology of writing must embrace affective (emotional) as well as cognitive phenomena.
The limitations of taking a purely cognitive view
Our respect for writing as an intellectual enterprise is understandable. We often assess children’s writing by looking for features like: organisation, elaboration, exemplification, and critical thinking. However, the dominant cognitive models of writing², while promising to reunite writing and thinking, fall short in several crucial areas:
🤷 Missing the most important ‘Why’: While cognitive psychologists tell us that our writing choices aren’t random, they struggle to explain why we choose what we choose to write about. This fundamental question often involves our interests, values, funds-of-knowledge and identity which are deeply intertwined with emotion³.
🤷 Neglecting motivation: Teaching recommendations often only give lip-service to motivation, often subordinating it to intellect. It’s frequently tucked into corners or delicately skirted around. Yet, major research highlights the role of emotions like apathy, anxiety, frustration, engagement, persistence and commitment play in learning to write⁴.
😐 The myth of emotional neutrality in non-fiction writing: Some erroneously link ‘emotional neutrality’ as being a sign of quality non-fiction writing. They suggest that being aloof from your emotions, experiences and values is the hallmark of great non-fiction writing. We disagree⁵. Some of the best non-fiction involves passionate and emotional contributions from the writer.
🌑 Methodological blind spots: Cognitive models often rely on ‘think-aloud protocols’ to understand students’ writing processes. Think-aloud protocols are a research method where students verbalise their thoughts in real time while performing a writing task, so researchers can infer their underlying cognitive processes. Yet, these protocols are limited to what people can articulate and what they are asked to articulate. They tend to overlook the emotional thoughts that run through our heads. A significant amount of material – grunts, groans, squeals of delight, flashes of mental pictures, random connections, and side comments loaded with feeling are often left out.
🤖♥️ Lack of emotional language and mechanical metaphors: Cognitive process models provide no language for emotion, effectively excluding it from their research and pedagogy². Instead, it’s common for cognitive psychologists to use jargon that sounds mechanical, promoting almost a robotic view of writing. Calling students monitors or operators rather than individuals or persons creates the idea that children are circuits, transistors, or else are acting like computers. Indeed, many cognitive process models are called computational models for this reason. This perspective fails to capture the rich psychological dynamics of humans; computers, unlike humans, do not grow, think, experience, learn, understand, or feel.
🗺️📍 Assumed motivation and objectivity: Cognitive models of writing can lead teachers to apply the model too directly, expecting students to write in the ways the model prescribes. This assumes a kind of flat, uncomplicated objectivity (and motivation) that may not actually exist for students. As teachers, we know that some of the best writing children produce comes from those who resist or defy us, while some of the weakest writing can come from those who mindlessly obey. The implication that one writing process is superior simply because it aligns with a single cognitive model is far from the truth².
The power of emotion in writing
Cognitive models for writing are not ‘wrong’; they are merely incomplete. Emotions and children’s affective needs are not side effects but fundamental elements in learning to write. The field of writing instruction has shifted from focusing on what students produce (the product) to how they write (the process). Now it is time to fully embrace the why of writing: children’s affective needs and motivation⁶.
Here’s how acknowledging the role of emotion can transform our teaching:
🥳😀🥱😭😤😡 Understanding emotional cues: Help students attend not only to the intellectual but also the emotional cues of writing. What feelings arise in the space between having an idea and beginning a draft? How do students’ affective needs shift depending on purpose, genre, audience, topic, or time constraints?
♥️🧠 Attending to children’s affective needs: For students who struggle with writing, understanding and supporting children’s affective needs at different parts of the writing process can significantly improve their writing performance⁶. Studying how professional writers, recreational writers, and their own teachers engage emotionally with writing can also provide pupils with valuable insights⁷.
Ultimately, while it is in cognition that writing ideas make sense, it is in emotion that this writing finds value. By integrating the whys of writing into our teaching, we can offer a more effective and affective approach to teaching writing.
References
- The Why of Cognition: Emotion and the Writing Process by Alice G. Brand [LINK]
- The Science Of Teaching Primary Writing [LINK]
- Writing Realities [LINK]
- Motivating Writing Teaching [LINK]
- How To Teach Non-Fiction Writing In The EYFS [LINK], How To Teach Non-Fiction Writing In KS1 [LINK] and Real World Writers [LINK]
- The affective domains of writing for pleasure [LINK]
- Be a writer-teacher [LINK]