The 21 Senses was created by two former high school English teachers in San Diego in the 1980s: Frank Barone (1929-) of Poway High School and Gary Bradshaw (1948-1994) of Rancho Bernardo High School, who had also previously taught at Poway.
This system was adopted from the teachings of English professor Don Murray (1924-2006), who taught at the University of New Hampshire and wrote for The Boston Globe as a columnist for more than 20 years. Like an open-world video game, the system allows you—the writer—to create and show your experiences and thoughts rather than just telling them. What’s the difference?
Telling: The pizza is delicious and hot.
Showing: The soft mozzarella refuses to let go of the crisp dough after I bit into it. Rolling my eyes up for a second, I savored the rich taste of cheese, tomato, and oregano, ignoring the slight singe on the roof of my mouth.
Telling: The movie is okay. It was predictable.
Showing: I kept checking my phone to see the time and potential messages as I “watched” the latest movie. I tried not to yawn as I anticipated where the plot flowed. And yes—as I predicted—the hero breaks her chains, defeats her captures with improvised weapons, and escapes on a motorcycle guarded by a sleepy henchman, riding off to eliminate the villain and save the world.
No surprise.
Basically, the 21 Senses teaches writers to use the active voice rather than the passive voice, which often relies on vagueness and the verb “to be” and “to have” and their various forms. Telling in writing reveals very little to the reader about your experience and thoughts. For example, the pizza sentence could mean different things to each reader. However, the showing version describes the texture, quality, and perhaps even the type of pizza.
You could apply the 21 Senses to a variety of topics relating to massage therapy: describing your massage room, your first massage experience, how a client felt after a session, your frustration of starting a business. Mastering the “showing” in your writing stands you out from other therapists and writers who often tell instead of show. Upon completing the 21 Senses, you will approach writing “without the weakness of abstraction and cliché usually found in [teenage] writing.”1
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Gary Bradshaw. Photo: RBHS Yearbook, Class of 1995