After completing my first essay on Sondra Perl, I was left a little confused about her ideas on retrospective Structuring and Felt Sense. However, after reading it again and discussing it in class, I must say that I have a pretty good idea about the components of felt sense and retrospective structuring. Retrospective structuring is a process in which you take the ideas that are floating around in your head and apply them to paper in a structured and organized form. For example, if Elizabeth had to write a paper about dogs, she would probably be thinking about all her experiences with dogs. She will then organize those thoughts and structure them in a way that makes sense. Once she has written a couple of sentences, she rereads her work to see if she wrote down what she intended to say. This process of retrospective structuring also calls upon the use of felt sense; they work together making sure the structure is correct and the actual feeling you wanted to project is correct. The other part of this trio is called projective structuring. While felt sense and retrospective structuring are working hand and hand, projective structuring comes into the equation to put yourself into the audiences shoes. Not focusing on the correctness of the piece, but focusing on another perspective (the audiences perspective). The process of projective structuring will enable you, as the writer to identify all the things that you noticed while reading other works. It enables you to look your work and include positive and avoid negative writing techniques in your work.
Retrospective structuring, felt sense, and projective structuring work together in order to compose a piece that is intelligible to others, that is what you want to say, and that takes your audience into perspective. Although, this process may sound like that’s all you need in order write a perfect paper, it is not. As writers, we must remember that writing is a recursive process and even after you have written the first draft, you have to go back , revise, rewrite, edit and/or scrap what you felt was not needed.
Ebonie, I'm glad you have worked out the difference between felt sense and retrospective structuring! It looks like you really have. The only thing you say here that was a bit confusing to me was the part about positive vs negative techniques. What do you mean by that? What would be "positive" and what would be "negative"?
ReplyDeleteWhen I mention positive and negative techniques, I was actually talking in reference to the sentence structure or rules to writing sentences. A simple example of a positive technique would be to begin a sentence with a capital letter; a negative simple example would be to avoid run-on sentences.
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