05 | October | 2026 | ENG 5020: Writing Theory & Practice

This past week we shuffled the schedule a bit to accomodate an ill colleague (who will instead present next Thursday). Therefore, we will have a double header for the theme of Writing & Identity (including presentations from both Cj & Zach) on Oct. 8th!

anonymous person walking on pavement with fallen leaves — Photo by Hikmet on Pexels.com

Our first Writers Walk

But for this past week, we shifted our gears and spent a bit of time with thinking about some underpinnings of Writing Studies. We started this work together with a beautiful Writer’s Walk through our early evening campus on a lovely autumn evening. We discovered a frolicking fawn and it’s doe mother just feet away from our walking line, we noticed the time on the clock tower, the reflective light of the setting sun on the windows of CAS, the din of institutional fans and motors that run in our buildings, the booming sound of airplanes overhead heading towards EWR, the trickling sounds of our campus creek, …and you also discovered my fast paced walking habits. ☺️😂 When we returned from this activity, you all took the time to write about the experience. The truth is, Writing doesn’t happen only in the mind. Writing is embodied. We write with our whole selves. Our memories, our emotions, our experiences, our attention, our energy, our senses, and our physical bodies.

Your body as writing compass

Your body can be a compass for your writing. What makes you lean in to a thought or concern? What gives you energy? Where do you feel curiosity, tension, resistance, excitement, or even boredom? What are your drawn toward? Where do you feel energy or curiosity? Where do you feel resistance, and what might that resistance be telling you? What ideas keep returning to you?

The body doesn’t always give us the answer, but it can help us notice where the interesting questions are.

Our slides:

Gallery Walk

We followed up this exercise with a Gallery Walk where we further explored four ways of understanding writing. You weighed in on the following ideas: Writing is Embodiment; Writing is Power; Writing is Technology; and Writing is Social. At each station, you spent a few minutes responding to a prompt on poster paper. I enjoyed our ensuing conversation around each of the posters you generated together. I think it helped us see the insights that can come from collaboration and reflection. I think one overall take-away was about what happens when we stop thinking of writing as simply something we do, and start thinking about writing as something that shapes us, our relationships, our tools, and our world? This is why Writing Studies as a discipline is exciting. Because when we look at writing as embodied, social, technological, and connected to power, we begin to understand that actually writing is everywhere. We begin to ask much bigger questions about what writing does in the world, and what it does to the world.