Writing Apprehension: How Can The Writing Center Help?

Writing center discourse is often centered on the idea that writing is a process, and a tutors job is to aid student writers throughout various stages of their composing processes. Steven North supports this view in his essay, Idea of a Writing Center, as do many others who outline the basic stages of writing and various rhetorical tools and techniques that tutors can teach to students. However, this view is incomplete. Writing is not simply a progression from one technical stage to the next; if writing centers are to create better writers, not better writing (North), then they must address the emotional components of the writing process as well. For many, anxiety, procrastination, and perfectionism are a part of the composing process in addition to the more commonly recognized stages of planning, drafting, revising, and so on. Writers who experience these feelings to the extent that they are crippled by them each time they approach a writing assignment can be said to have writing apprehension, or an irrational, unproductive fear of writing characterized by avoidance and withdrawal (Johnstone 2010). This can have disastrous consequences, the worst of which for writing centers and students alike being withdrawal from writing altogether. Because of this, writing centers must take an interest in working with apprehensive writers in a very student-centered, rather than product-centered, way perhaps even more so than North suggests. Tutors must be taught to identify potential apprehensive writers through conversation and through analysis of students composing processes; they need to understand possible causes for writing apprehension as well as an array of techniques to help students overcome this obstacle and become better writers. Writing apprehension shows itself in different forms, but its results are always destructive to the writer. Students who are anxious or overwhelmed by the challenging, demanding process of writing might respond by procrastinating. This, of course, is only a temporary fix, and in fact

it makes the inevitable task of writing even more difficult in (at least) two ways: it takes the place of an important period of exploration and discovery during the prewriting stage of composition, and it significantly increases stress levels as the deadline creeps closer. The work that comes out of this is often rushed, and it may not accurately reflect the students intelligence and writing ability. On the other hand, students who spend too much time drafting a piece of writing, laboring over each word, are likewise likely to run into problems as they write. Perfectionism, or the obsessive need for control over ones writing in order to get it right, hinders the flow of writing, and, consequently, of learning. It also makes the writing process excruciatingly stressful and frightening. Both of these facets of writing apprehension inhibit learning during the composition process and ultimately lead to poor performance by students who are actually quite skilled. This is a loss for writing centers and students alike; the former misses out on the opportunity to engage with the insightful ideas of the latter, and the latter often suffers a poor grade, low self-confidence, and unnecessary anxiety and stress. The factors contributing to these damaging aspects of composition stem from both external and internal sources. One thing that tends to cause great anxiety among student writers is the fear of evaluation and for good reason. One study found that comments on student essays are overwhelmingly negative (Daiker). Though the numbers may well have changed in todays educational environment, composition teachers are still largely perceived by students as critic[s] and editor[s]error finder[s] (Johnstone 159). A clear link between this kind of negative evaluation and writing apprehension is present in a study conducted by Thomas Gee, in which he found that: [S]tudents whose compositions received either criticism alone or no commentary at all developed significantly more negative attitudes toward writing than students whose compositions received only praise. Moreover, after just four weeks, students who

received only negative comments or none at all were writing papers significantly shorter than those of students who were praised. (Daiker 156) Indeed, the negative comments received from teachers may be internalized as an unrelenting critical voice (Johnstone 159) which can cause students to prematurely evaluate and edit their own work; anything that does not immediately come out perfect is thrown out, leaving very little material left to work with. As Daiker explains, this whole process starts a cycle in which students, in anticipation of negative feedback, avoid writing (Daiker), which in turn inhibits them from improving their writing, earning them even more negative comments. It is not difficult, then, to see how teachers criticisms can lower students confidence, create anxiety, and foster sour attitudes towards writing. In an effort to cope with this anxiety, and perhaps to protect themselves from negative evaluations, some students depend on rigid, ultimately unproductive, rules in their writing. For example, Rose worked with five undergraduate writers who were experiencing moderate to nearly immobilizing writer's block (Rose 389) and using ineffective strategies as guidelines as they tried to write. One student, Ruth, obsessed over sentence-level issues, operating with this rule: If sentences arent grammatically correct, they arent useful (Rose 394). Rose says that this keeps Ruth from toying with ideas on paper, from the kind of linguistic play that often frees up the flow of prose (Rose 394). Another student, Martha, put off writing by utilizing unnecessarily extensive, convoluted prewriting techniques. She would not put pen to first draft until she[d] spent up to two days generating an outline of remarkable complexity (Rose 394), at which point she felt so overwhelmed that she could no longer narrow her focus. Both of these methods hamper the potential for learning through writing, making the process tedious and frustrating rather than fruitful.

These dysfunctional strategies (Rose), often taken from rules discussed in composition classes and then used inappropriately, tend to have an emotional component that traces back to perfectionism, procrastination, or some other aspect of writing apprehension. They lock the writer in an early stage of writing (Rose 394), inhibiting exploration of alternative, perhaps more contextually appropriate, rhetorical choices. For instance, it is possible that a simple clustering exercise or verbal brainstorming session would have been more appropriate for Marthas writing assignment rather than a complex, detailed outline. Whether or not this is the case, her rigid habit of approaching every paper in the same way is not useful for approaching a task as complex as writing. It leaves students struggling to fit each unique writing assignment they encounter into a predetermined frame. In other words, it makes writing more difficult rather than making it more manageable, which is the intended purpose of planning and drafting strategies. In order to help students overcome this, one thing writing centers can do is to start exploring this emotional realm of the writing process in their tutoring courses. A course, or at least a significant portion of a course, can be devoted to possible causes, forms, consequences, and most importantly, solutions for writing apprehension so that tutors can gain an understanding of this problem. Examining their own unique composing processes and experiences with writing, tutors can learn to identify and evaluate strategies they have used how do I approach a research paper as opposed to a personal narrative? what kinds of strategies made writing flow more smoothly and what kinds made it more stressful and difficult? as well as effective coping mechanisms they have used when dealing with a difficult assignment. This self-reflection alone already provides them with a variety of tools they can share with tutees. It also serves as a model for the conversation they can aim to have with students within the confines of short writing center tutorials. The tutor can ask the writer about his or her past writing experiences,

incorporating the tutors own reflections into the discussion to help draw the writer into deeper thought about the strategies that they use but rarely question; even a brief examination of a students writing process can illuminate the causes of his or her writing apprehension and lead to a focused discussion of coping strategies. At this point, tutors can use a number of different techniques that fall within two broad categories: creating a positive writing experience, and providing the tutee with options. The first of these aims to transform the negative attitudes apprehensive writers have towards writing by reducing anxiety and building confidence. The tutor can empathize with the student in a way that is believable and comforting, opening the door to a productive conversation about effective and ineffective writing strategies. He or she provides a stark contrast to the critical error-obsessed teacher with whom these students have likely interacted, offering productive, positive feedback from the perspective of a peer rather than a critic. This can be one step towards reducing the fear of evaluation that is one major cause of writing apprehension, and, over time, can even modify students attitudes towards writing. Perhaps in a positive environment they can begin to understand the merits of writing for the purpose of learning and making meaning rather than focusing solely on teacher-evaluation. Tutors can also help students examine the rigid, dysfunctional techniques they employ and provide them with numerous alternatives, emphasizing the need for flexibility in successful writing. In addition to positive reinforcement, this is the most important thing tutors have to offer options. Students bogged down by irrelevant rules and static, unproductive drafting techniques should be encouraged to consider different approaches that suit different types of writing assignments. For instance, tutors can help perfectionist writers gain the control over their writing for which they have always strived by teaching them to actually relinquish control of sentence-

level concerns while composing early drafts; they can share strategies that focus just on the generation of ideas instead of perfect diction or grammar. Exercises such as satisficing, or settling on the first word that comes to mind (Johnstone 162), or Peter Elbows freewriting, which requires that one writes continuously without editing, free up the flow of thoughts and ideas, fostering discovery and deeper thinking. According to Elbow, The commonsense, conventional understanding of writing is as follows: First you figure out your meaning, then you put it into languageThis idea of writing is backwards (Elbow 14). He goes on to say that Meaning is not what you start out with but what you end up withThink of writing then not as a way to transmit a message but as a way to grow and cook a message (Elbow 15). This view of writing places much more importance on playing with words and exploring ideas than producing a perfectly polished, refined early draft. It paints writing as a dynamic, fluid act in which meaning is made, not transmit[ted] (Elbow 15), emphasizing the need for a writer to plan less and write more. Though it may not always be practical in a short tutoring session, this approach can be greatly beneficial for apprehensive writers in the Peer Tutoring Center. When a student is confused about how to start writing or revising, it is helpful to remind them that they do not have the start at the beginning. The tutor and tutee can identify together one aspect of the assignment sheet that is especially challenging or interesting to the student, and both of them can freewrite on that one point for five-to-seven minutes, focusing solely on ideas rather than organization, grammar, or word choice. The tutor should participate in order to make the student feel comfortable, and, more importantly, in order to show the student that it is possible to write about a topic with which one is not yet familiar. Afterwards, the tutor and tutee can both read aloud what they have written, using it as a guide for the conversation, and try to identify even a

glimmer of useful information that can give the student direction with his or her paper. This exercise addresses both perfectionism and procrastination, encouraging writers to jump in and start writing rather than over-planning or prematurely editing themselves. Similarly, Elbows process of loop-writing breaks the daunting task of writing down into manageable pieces for writer whose anxiety causes them to procrastinate. According to Johnstone, the attempt to evade anxiety by drawing out preparations and postponing writing may begin withgrandiosity: an exaggerated sense of accomplishment, impelled by discoveries made during research, that excuses postponing the recording of those discoveries (Johnstone 160). In this case, Johnstone says that the feeling of accomplishment will be replaced by guilt when the writer continues to put off writing for a long time. However, Elbows loopwriting may make it possible for a writer to capture that sense of accomplishment and propel forward in the writing process. In this exercise, a writer begins a project by writing a quick, fifteen-minute draft using whatever information he or she has as the time. Afterwards he or she can examine patterns of ideas, holes in an argument, and so on, finding direction for further research. This process can be repeated many times, and the writer can experiment with writing for different audiences or different formats in order to gain access to new perspectives. This gives the writer material to work with and brings him or her closer to a final draft. In the Peer Tutoring Center, a tutor can attempt to end a session by creating a very specific set of revision goals for a tutee to complete step-by-step, perhaps incorporating the loop-writing process, in order to make writing feel more manageable; this may be one way to give the tutee the sense of accomplishment that will help him or her maintain momentum. All of these techniques focus on writing as a complex but rewarding process of learning and meaning making rather than a mere task to be evaluated. They encourage students to be

confident when facing a writing assignment, and to begin the process by focusing solely on producing words and ideas, not necessarily a perfectly constructed argument or grammatically flawless work. This idea of focusing on one or two aspects of the writing process at a time, both by avoiding perfectionism and premature editing and by breaking projects into manageable pieces, rather than trying to control all aspects simultaneously reduces stress and increases productivity. Moreover, it allows for fruitful discovery and learning, because it leads writers down paths from which they may have previously closed themselves off by adhering to a rigid outline. Ultimately, by providing apprehensive writers with a positive environment in which they can improve their writing, as well as an array of tools and techniques that give them flexibility and confidence, a writing center can fulfill its goal of creating better writers, not better writing (North).

Works Cited Daiker, Donald. Learning to Praise. Writing and Response: Theory, Practice, and Research. Ed. Chris Anson. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1989. 10313. Elbow, Peter. Writing without teachers. Oxford University Press, USA, 1998. Johnstone, Anne. "The Writer's Hell: Approaches to Writer's Block." Journal of Teaching Writing 2.2 (2010): 155-166. North, Stephen M. "The idea of a writing center." College English 46.5 (1984): 433-446. Rose, Mike. "Rigid rules, inflexible plans, and the stifling of language: A cognitivist analysis of writer's block." College Composition and Communication 31.4 (1980): 389-401.