When prompted with a research question, we often think where should I begin? We also question how to summarize our thoughts onto paper. Trying to write an essay can be a very frustrating process, but it doesn't have to be. If you know the steps and understand what to do, writing can be easy and less painful. Sondra Perl makes it easier for us. Sondra Perl’s “Felt Sense: Writing with the body” discusses how felt sense connects the mind with the body, language with feeling and discovering with knowing. Sondra Perl is an English Professor at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Perl has been leading writing workshops on college campuses for over 20 years. According to Perl, we always have an idea of what we want to write even when we may not have the words for it and this where our felt sense comes into place. I feel that her most important idea to the field of theorizing the writing process is her felt sense concept.
Felt sense was originally developed by the philosopher Eugene Gendlin. He says “It is something so simple, so easily available to every person, that at first its very simplicity makes it hard to point to. Another term for it is felt meaning or feeling. However, feeling is a word usually used for (specific feelings)…. But regardless of the many changes in what we feel –that is to say, really how we feel- there always is concretely present flow of feeling.” I feel that Gendlin is saying that we all have a felt sense; however we don’t even realize it. The fact that it comes off as a simple idea, we don’t notice it. We may think that it is just our thoughts, but I feel that it is more than that. Gendlin describes it as “specific feelings” and sometimes we don’t focus on this because we may think we’ve already mastered our feelings in our paper. I think that sometimes we don’t know how to express our true feelings because of the all the overflowing of thoughts that are running in our