Context: This writing sample is based on a blog post I wrote during my time as a Writing Consultant at William & Mary. It has since been edited and expanded upon.
Managing Anxiety in Writing Centers
By Sophia Shealy
During my time as a writing consultant, I’ve worked on personal statements, PowerPoint presentations, and all manner of research papers. Sometimes, my students and I spend our sessions fixing simple grammar errors and working on ways to avoid them in the future. Other times, we may overhaul the essay’s entire structure. No paper is ever the same, even if I work with multiple students from the same class on the same assignment. However, one phenomenon is so common, it supersedes all others: writing anxiety. What I mean is hard to pin down with specificity, but essentially, writing anxiety occurs when writers – even if they have written a stellar essay with minimal room for “improvement” – feel intense anxiety about their work, derogating what they have written in anticipation of a critique from me. During my time as a writing tutor, not a day passes without encountering a tremulous soul declaring, “I know, I’m so bad at this,” or “My professor thought my last paper was stupid, so this one definitely is too,” or “I have no idea what I’m doing.” I empathize. I’ve felt the same way about my own writing.
In her essay, “Writer’s Anxiety,” Amy Green defines this condition as “feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes like increased blood pressure when faced with a writing task.” But what are the origins of this common fear? The Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill contends that these symptoms arise from negative feedback in the past regarding written work, unfamiliarity with particular styles of writing, and/or overall feelings of stress and exhaustion. For most students, college is already rife with anxiety, so writing a paper – especially with little prior experience at the university level, combined with negative self perceptions as a writer – can be daunting to say the least. For consultants in writing centers, the anxiety of those who come to us can also be anxiety-producing. After all, we often aren’t subject matter experts in the topics our students are trying to address, nor are we trained to handle the condition of anxiety. So, what is the right approach to help others not only improve their writing, but also feel more at peace with what they’ve written?
In my experience, there is no one strategy for addressing writing anxiety. What works for one person may fail with the next. Truth be told, sometimes the issues go far beyond our scope of responsibility. That said, here are four lessons I have learned in various writing center roles, which may be helpful when working with others who are in the grip of writing anxiety.
Empathize. Let them know you understand their fear and uneasiness. If it makes sense for you, and if it feels authentic, talk to them about a time when you have felt similarly. Feelings of isolation, even dread, are often associated with writer’s anxiety, so normalize this experience for your students. They aren’t the first or last writer to have such concerns, and there’s nothing shameful or abnormal about what they’re feeling.
Get to the core of the problem. What is it about this paper or assignment that’s causing significant distress? The deadline? The requirements? Past writing experiences? If you can narrow down the source of the writer’s concerns, it will be much easier to derive solutions.
Accentuate the positive. People are often better writers than they believe, and in the throes of writer’s anxiety, it can be easy to attribute problems in an essay to something intrinsic and immutable, like “being bad at writing.” Writing is a craft that takes time to master, and burgeoning writers become better with practice and support. Let them know that, and highlight what is working, rather than focusing solely on what is wrong.
Take the time to help. If someone is clearly experiencing writing anxiety, it won’t help to remind them they’re on the clock or that you have other things to do. Believe me, they feel time passing even more than you do. Brushing over their feelings, or rushing them through the experience, will just make things worse. More than anything, students need to be heard by someone who “gets it” and has “been there / done that.” If talking through their worries takes ten minutes more than you have allotted – even twenty – that just goes with the territory. Your time and care may be as important as anything you offer from a technical standpoint.
As long as there are essays to write, there will be writers anxiously trying to complete them. As consultants, but more importantly, as writers ourselves who have likely experienced many of these symptoms, it’s crucial to remember our own insecurities as well as the developmental trajectories that helped us become the writers we are today. Writing consultants are not therapists or counselors, but we can, and should, be helpful and encouraging. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions, but the four strategies offered above have worked for me. Give them a try and find your own. Most of all, be kind. By paying it forward in this way, you’ll receive the gift of a beaming student who seeks you out after a successful paper submission, full of gratitude and newfound confidence as a writer. That’s when you – the writing consultant – learn a fifth and final lesson: You make a difference that matters.