Category: Writing Advice

Making Peer Feedback Valuable to You 

Jameson Reid and Shelby Cundiff – Writing Consultants

Introduction: 

No matter what your peers say about your writing, or even your professors, your writing is ultimately yours. You have the best ideas of what you want your writing to consist of. No one knows better than you the argument that you are trying to make and the effects you want your writing to have. However, many professors are pushing their students to do peer feedback, and are even implementing class time to work in pairs or small groups to look over each other’s work. At times, this will take place in person where you all can have a conversation about the work, and other times, you might read through each other’s work alone and send a document of your thoughts. Or, maybe you are with your friends and you are all working on the same assignment, so you all offer to read through each other’s work. Regardless, these are all considered forms of peer review. Although the writing is yours, there is nothing wrong with a second set of eyes on your work; your peers, who are probably going through the same things as you, are good people to trust. Peers don’t have to be experts on your topic or in the craft of writing, but letting someone with an outside view of your paper experience your writing can be valuable to you.  

Using Peer Feedback (Jameson): 

When writing, it is very easy to get stuck in your own head. The sentences that you write may start to lose any meaning for you, and your argument may become unclear to anyone except yourself. Feedback can help you see what your argument is and see the structures and patterns that may have formed unintentionally. You can see if your peers are noticing what you are doing in your writing. What is being communicated effectively and what isn’t? Suggestions for improvements may be useful, or they may not be. Trust in your reader but also trust in yourself. If a peer’s comments feel completely off or their suggestions go against what you want to do, then ignore it, but understand why you are ignoring it. Have good reasons for making decisions, and be confident in knowing why you decide to follow a suggestion or disregard it. 

It also depends on the amount of peer reviewers you have. Some classes may have you work with a single partner, a small group, or the whole class may be workshopping your paper. You can look for shared opinions across your reviewers and you should be aware that it is likely that some of your reviewers may not be reading very closely or may not be particularly adept at giving feedback. If you have the opportunity to speak with your reviewers, then you can ask them to provide the feedback that is most useful to you. Ask them to describe their experience with different sections of your paper. Push them to try to identify why they don’t understand something. What specifically is in your paper that is causing the various reactions?  

Giving Peer Feedback (Jameson): 

As a peer reviewer often the best feedback you can give is to describe your experience when reading their writing. For an essay this can mean a few things. You can describe your understanding of the paper’s argument, identify the parts of the argument that you notice, and places that confuse you. You are giving your peer an outside perspective on their paper as someone who has not spent time researching and writing on the topic. Something that may be obvious to the writer, who is deeply entrenched in their subject, won’t be obvious to you and might need to be explained more. If you can find these moments then your feedback will be very useful to your peers. You can also question if your peer’s argument isn’t fully developed. Maybe there is a counterargument that they need to acknowledge. These comments however should always come with your understanding of what the argument is. Nothing is worse for a writer than them seeing criticisms of their argument that don’t make any sense to them. 

In creative writing workshops, the feedback to give is fairly similar. Give your reaction to the text. This can include your emotional reaction, your takeaways, or what you think the meaning is. Then, if you can, try to describe what elements of the writing created this meaning. How effective are these elements? Is there something the writer can do to improve these elements? If you have suggestions or ideas, feel free to give them, but don’t feel like you have to if you aren’t sure. Describing your experience is something that anyone can do and will still be very useful to the writer. Also, remember that writing can be very personal, even in scholarly work. Peer feedback is not just criticism and suggestions for improvement. It should also be positive. Describe what you really enjoyed, what was really effective. If you find their argument or topic interesting, let them know. Then when you have to be critical, be only critical and not insulting. Don’t be afraid to use peer feedback to your advantage; it could be helpful to you.  

What Peer Feedback Has Done For Me (Shelby):  

As someone who has always been a good writer and confident in her abilities to write papers, I never really understood the point of peer review… That was until the first year of undergrad, which hit me like a train. Partially, I thought peer review made me weak, as if I couldn’t write without needing validation from my classmates or friends. The other part of me was just stubborn, and continuously told myself I didn’t need it. However, I began to realize that there is nothing wrong with help, and a second set of eyes is now a must-have for me. During my first year at Centre College, the classes and writing assignments were harder, and combining this with a newfound independence, I learned quickly that I needed to use the resources around me to better myself. Thankfully, I was surrounded by friends who also loved writing, and enjoyed reading through my work, telling me what they liked, didn’t like, or what needed to be worked on. This process continued throughout my undergraduate experience, and has continued to be important to me as I have started graduate school.  

My senior spring, I decided to take a risk and take a creative writing class, where a big part of our grade was based on peer review. This class was arguably the most diverse class I had ever been in, and for that reason, I learned more than I ever had from reading my classmate’s works about their experiences and their readings of my work. For example, the first short story I wrote was about a girl who was struggling with her identity as a lesbian, and was therefore struggling to come out to her family and friends. While I am not a member of the LGBTQIA+ community myself, I had a peer reader who was, and assured me that I was doing a good job of conveying the experience of many queer individuals. Thinking back throughout my entire undergraduate experience, the difference in opinions, thoughts, and experiences of both my classmates and friends made me a better writer, thinker, reader, and overall person. With all of this being said, I want to encourage you to be okay with peer feedback, whether it be in your classes or just within your friend group. Just because someone tells you their opinion doesn’t mean you have to listen, but, you might find after reflecting on it, that it will help you in the long run. Other people may be more experienced than you in some areas, and there is nothing wrong with that. Writing is hard. You will never know everything. So, take advice from your peers, and do it sooner than I did. I promise, it helps. 

Getting Started with Writing

Mary Sherafati, Allie Degner, Shayani Almeida – Writing Consultants

How to write (Mary):

If you want to learn how to become a good writer, you should write every day. It will help you exercise the part of your brain responsible for your writing skills. For example, you can write in a diary. It can help you focus on your writing without worrying about your audience or anyone else’s thoughts. Moreover, it will provide you with a space to practice vocabulary. You should, in addition, read a lot. Reading is an excellent way to improve your writing skills. You can begin reading short novels and stories that interest you. Please think positively about writing and do not be afraid of it. You can also take some courses. I highly recommend you take part in our writing sessions. We have open writing time, faculty and graduate student writing groups, and creative writing groups. Through participating in our writing sessions, you can receive constructive feedback that can help you improve your writing. Please do not be afraid to ask for feedback from peers or editors, as it is one of the best strategies to improve your writing.

Remember that becoming a good writer takes practice and dedication, so do not be too hard on yourself as you start. It would be best if you also learned to overcome resistance since writing can be difficult at first, but it is essential to push through the resistance and keep going. You can develop your skills to produce excellent content with time and effort. Remember that building a confident mindset is essential to becoming a more confident writer. You can do this by setting realistic goals and controlling your internal dialogue. Focus on your strengths and celebrate your successes, no matter how small they may be.

Creating a topic (Allie):

Sometimes, developing a topic can be the trickiest part of your paper or assignment, as the rest of your project is determined by what it is your topic will be. There can be a lot of pressure on figuring out a topic, but do not stress! It is not as hard as you think.

First, if you have a list of possible topics but need help narrowing it down, focus on the topic that seems like most applicable to what the assignment is. Looking at assignment guidelines, what topic seems to fit the project the best? What would be the most interesting topic you could research or discuss for the assignment? Exploring these questions might be helpful for thinking about the topic in terms of what the assignment is asking for. However, you also want it to be a topic that you are also interested in, because that can help to fuel your motivation for completing the assignment. There is nothing worse than having to pour time into exploring a topic that you are not the slightest bit interested in. So, choose something you like!

Of course, your topic will vary depending on what the assignment is for your class. A lot of assignments require outside sources, and if this is the case for yours, it is always helpful to first check out what kinds of sources there are for your topic before you decide. If you can narrow down potential topics to three that stand out to you, it is helpful to therefore explore library databases or Google scholar to find what kinds of sources there are online that will help further develop your topic. Depending on the assignment you are doing, it is either a good or unhelpful thing if there are not many sources. It is helpful to not have many sources available for a topic because that will leave you space to do your own research for that topic, but also can be unhelpful if that is not what the assignment calls for.

Once you have browsed around for sources and depending on the assignment that your professor has given, you can ask yourself a couple of questions based on your findings: are any of the sources you have found particularly interesting and would be a good addition to a potential topic you have looked into? Has one of the topics you researched had little helpful sources? Has one of the topics had an abundant amount of sources? Or are they all about the same?

By looking into what kind of research is already out there, it will hopefully help you narrow down a topic for what you can discuss in your writing assignment. If you are still having trouble narrowing it down, remember that there are different resources that can help you! Professors are always available for spring boarding ideas, and us writing consultants in the Writing Center are also always available for helping you choose a topic. If you need help figuring out what sources are available for your topic, the research librarians will spend time with you and help you search for some, too. Do not be afraid to use the resources that are available to you!

Revising and Editing (Shayani):

I notice that most writers find it difficult to revise and edit their drafts to make an excellent final paper because they do not know the techniques for revising and editing. Revision is not like proofreading, although in the final stage, editing includes checking specific details. When reviewing your text, you take a second look at your ideas and you might want to add, remove, change, or make something more convincing. When you start editing, you should take a second look at how you have expressed your ideas. Here, you might add or change words, check, and fix any problems in punctuation and sentence structure. In this stage, you will improve your writing style and make it to be the product of your best efforts.

Once you complete your first draft, set aside your essay since you need to look at it from a fresh perspective. It might be too soon to make changes, so take a break. Reading aloud will also help you identify the key points that you have not addressed in your essay. The next step would be asking someone to provide you with feedback and constructive criticism. Then, look at your essay objectively and take the role of a reader in this phase. When reading it for the second time, we should think, are we satisfied or dissatisfied as readers? And why? This can help us get the best out of our revisions and editing. At the writing center, we help you figure out these techniques and help you create an excellent end product.

Creating Communities of Writers at our Dissertation Writing Retreat

Bronwyn T. Williams, Director

Twelve years ago, in my first year as director, we held our first Dissertation Writing Retreat. Every May since then we have brought together a group of 14 doctoral students from across the University for a week of writing time, individual consultations, conversations about writing – and food. We even did it online during the worst of the pandemic. We just finished our most recent Retreat, my last as director of the University Writing Center, and had writers from nine different disciplines participating. As you’ll see from their words below, it was a reminder, yet again, of why this is such a rewarding and productive experience for everyone involved and why it is the distinctive kind of work that University Writing Center provides to the University.

Dissertation Writing Retreat Participants – 2023

When the writers arrive at the first day of the Retreat they are often not entirely sure what to expect. Yes, they know they will write – a lot – and have individual writing consultations with a University Writing Center consultant, and take part in conversations led by our staff about dissertation writing issues. They are often hoping to get a lot written during the week, and that does happen. But what they are not always prepared for is how much they will learn about themselves as writers and scholars. Most of the people coming to the Retreat have not, during their time in graduate school, had a chance to have sustained conversations about the nature of writing as a researcher and scholar. Yet such conversations, about how they are positioning themselves in their fields, how they are understanding genres of research writing and making them their own, and how they are understanding and refining their writing processes, can provide them with both knowledge and confidence that allows them to find new momentum going forward with their projects. What we know is that, while getting words written during the week matters, the most important things we can offer are advice and insights that they can take with them as writers.

The idea that we are working on more than just on the draft a writer has with them at the moment, but trying to help them become stronger, and more confident, writers in the future is central to the work of most writing centers. What is different about the Dissertation Writing Retreat from our regular consultations is that the nature of the Retreat, of spending each days writing and talking with others, is also an opportunity for ongoing reflection and community building that is rewarding in every way. What I wrote in 2011 about the first Retreat was equally applicable to this year:

“There was the benefit of being part of a community of writers. Writing a dissertation – writing anything, really –  can feel like such an isolated and lonely endeavor. This week all the participants in the retreat found themselves in a community of writers. They’ve talked about the benefit of the support that comes from talking with peers about writing issues and getting both suggestions as well as empathy. They found that talking, and often laughing, about writing, even when your field is far removed from writing studies, can be enriching. And they also found that simply being in a room with other people writing can inspire them to continue to create words.”

One of our ongoing goals at the University Writing Center is to nurture and support a culture of writing on campus, and the Dissertation Writing Retreat is a vital part of that effort. I want to thank all the writers who trusted us with their writing, all the consultants who brought their insights and enthusiasm to their work with the writers, and our amazing University Writing Center staff — Annmarie Steffes, Maddy Decker, and Kendyl Harmeling — who did the heavy planning and daily logistical work to make the event happen.

But, the best insights into the Dissertation Writing Retreat come from the writers and the consultants, and here is what they have to say. You can see why it’s one of our favorite weeks of the year.

Writers

Fatima Aldarweesh, Public Health

Participating in the “Dissertation Writing Treat” event was a truly enjoyable and productive experience. It is extremely beneficial to me; I received more than I expected. I appreciated how Dr. Bronwyn and his incredible team collaborated with us to form a supportive intellectual group; I enjoyed the small group discussions. They have influenced my productivity and helped me overcome feelings of isolation. I also appreciate Ms. Aubrie, my writing consultant, for taking the time to familiarize herself with my topic and assisting me with editing, revising, and proofreading even kept me accountable for my writing each day and inspired me to try new writing techniques.

Caitlin Allen – Rhetoric and Composition

The Dissertation Writing Retreat was an incredibly valuable experience. The Writing Center team and the rest of my retreat cohort created such an energizing and supportive environment. Working with a writing consultant every afternoon was especially useful; Christina provided wonderful and thoughtful feedback on my drafts, helped me talk through ideas, and celebrated my wins. At the end of the week, I felt much more confident in my dissertation project and my writing process. I strongly recommend the writing retreat to dissertation writers from any discipline across campus. 

Meaghan Flynn – Psychology

I learned so much about myself as a writer and the writing experience during the dissertation writing retreat. I had never given much thought to the different aspects of writing and the retreat was a wonderful opportunity to explore my writing habits and how I can practice engaging in both deep thinking and communicating about my deep thinking. I greatly appreciated the individual writing consultations throughout the week. This was an excellent challenge to think deeply about what aspects of writing I was struggling with and how to communicate those needs. I am very grateful to have had this opportunity and would absolutely recommend the retreat to any graduate student for their dissertation. 

Hannah Heitz – Education and Human Development

The retreat was immensely helpful! First, it provided me with a lot of motivation and helped me feel energized about the writing process. Second, it reminded me to use small goals to make progress when I’m feeling overwhelmed. Third, I was reminded that it’s ok to write badly—this opened the door for me to make great strides and avoid perfectionistic traps. I learned some other specific tools for revising and time management (I took many notes that I’ll be coming back to in the months and years to come).

Amanda Lacey – Education and Human Development

The Dissertation Writing Retreat has by far been one of the most helpful and empowering experiences of my doctoral journey.  While I was extremely nervous (almost panicked!) coming in, convinced I’d spend the majority of the time helplessly staring at a blinking cursor at my screen, I instead wound up making significant progress on both my writing and my outline for future chapters. I credit this success to the structure of the retreat: each day has a pre-set schedule that includes not only individual writing time, but also group discussions on various writing strategies, an hour-long appointment with a writing consultant, and plenty of opportunities to reflect. Even the break for lunch proved to be productive, as all of us attendees spent the time getting to know each other and share ideas and strategies across content areas. We even created a special Teams channel after the retreat so we can all keep in touch and keep each other accountable. In short, this writing retreat is not merely writing non-stop for 8 hours a day; instead, it’s writing sprints mixed in with opportunities to acquire new strategies, build productive writing habits, and form a strong community of colleagues that will help you get to the end of your doctoral journey — and beyond. Indeed, through this process, I was able to complete more writing in the course of a single week than I did in the previous six months. Now that the week is over, I feel re-energized and ready to tackle the rest of my dissertation. I am so grateful to have had this opportunity and would recommend it to any doctoral student from any discipline that needs that little extra push to get across the finish line.

Renee Richardson – Pan-African Studies

I gained helpful strategies from my consultant, Olalekan. His advice about the writing process allowed me to craft research questions, themes, and topics for each chapter of my dissertation. Focused research question and themes helped me to develop key terms for finding better articles and books tailored to my literature review. Also, the discussions were valuable. I was able to gain insight from other students and professionals about responding to committee feedback, maintaining discipline and momentum after the retreat, and literature review tips. Discussion leaders like Kendyl shared resources with us that I can refer back to as I complete my project. Kendyl also suggested using a Double Entry Journal which I set up during the retreat.

Consultants

Kendyl Harmeling, Assistant Director for Graduate Student Writing

This year’s Dissertation Writing Retreat was exactly that – a retreat. It’s a writing professional’s dream to work at such an event, where the sustained writing, writing discussion, and community building is fueled by (and fuels) passionate and hard-working writers across disciplines. To be in a room of writers writing is undeniably a privilege. As an assistant director of the University Writing Center, this was my first year helping to run discussions and days of the DWR and my second year as a consultant for our participating writers. The conversations we had all week about individual projects, the genre of the dissertation, and the writing process in general were maintained and tended to constantly in writing consultations, whole group discussions, and even on the walks back to the parking lots after a day’s end. Our participating writers and the energy they brought to the retreat this year are a reminder why these programs are so valuable – not just to each writer but to the University and the PhD process. They help us help each other.

Olalekan Adepoju

Having worked with writers at the dissertation writing retreat for three consecutive years, this year’s retreat was not short of the intrigues, excitement and motivation writers often exhibited throughout the five-day event. The most rewarding aspect of the retreat for me is learning about the incredible projects people are working on, and just generally experiencing the sheer joy with which these writers talk about their projects. This year, I had the opportunity to work with writers who are at different stages of their dissertation. While one was in the early stages, working on conceptualizing and framing the research questions and ideas for literature review, the other was working through their drafts to make connections across multiple drafts. For the writers, the efforts they put into their work are remarkable as those efforts helped to drive our conversations in a way that suits their needs throughout the retreat. At the end of the dissertation writing retreat, both writers affirmed to me that they now have an awareness of what their writing processes look like and a better understanding of how to apply writing concepts in their work. 

Christina Davidson

While I spent the last year working in the University Writing Center, this was my first opportunity to work with writers during the Dissertation Writing Retreat. It was a delight. As expected, I was deeply encouraged by the determination and community-building among the writers throughout the week. The two writers I worked with specifically expressed similar thoughts. In fact, one of the writers I assisted called this retreat a “reset button” and said it restored her focus on her dissertation project. Many writers expressed feeling as though the retreat helped them to finally assume their scholarly authority through writing. They claimed the workshops and consulting sessions were the difference-maker in shaping how they viewed their writing project. What I noticed was the incredible attention to care the staff at the UWC gave toward helping these writers succeed. It’s an incredible service offered to the UofL graduate student community. I highly recommend this retreat to any PhD student at UofL looking for guidance, planning, and support in the dissertation process. 

Jess Gottbrath

My experience at this year’s Dissertation Writing Retreat fostered an appreciation for the interdisciplinary nature of academia. Engaging in casual conversations and writing consultations exposed me to an array of research topics, methods, and perspectives. I learned about specific classes in other departments as well as overall programs of study quite different from what I have known in the world of Rhetoric & Composition. Despite these variations across content and coursework and committees, I sensed the connectedness in our pursuits. While we construct knowledge from diverse positions within the university, our collective work enables a complex understanding of the multifaceted issues in our society. 

With Writing Always at the Center (Part II): Reflections on A Dozen Years as Director

Bronwyn T. Williams, Director

Here’s the thing about writing, it is a distinctive medium not just for communicating across space and time, but for connecting human consciousness. When we write, we lay out our thoughts in a way so that someone across the world, or across centuries, can understand our perspectives, our interpretations, our desires. Writing allows us to convey not only the surfaces we can see, but the thoughts and emotions that we hold most central to our lives and identities. Though not everything we write is of equal intensity and meaning, writing is always available to us to make these essential connections. The fact that AI platforms may be able to mimic broadly some writing is beside the point. When we want, when we need, to connect our minds to the minds of others, writing will continue to be there for us, and to matter deeply.

It is this ability to connect human thought, to make meaning, that makes writing the intellectual center of life in the university. Writing that truly asks people to solve problems, create, synthesize, critique, resist, advocate, and connect is writing that makes knowledge. Because humans are meaning-making creatures, we will continue to try to figure out the world around us, and our lives within, and good, thoughtful writing, will continue to be central to that endeavor. All of this is why the University Writing Center, overlooked, underfunded, and often misunderstood, matters so much. For the past twelve years it has been my privilege to serve as director of the University Writing Center. After this spring, however, I will be stepping aside as director and, before I do, I want to take a moment to reflect on why I think the work of the University Writing Center is so important, as well thank the people with whom I have shared in this work.

The Purest Teaching On Campus

The meaningful work in the University Writing Center is grounded in the talent and commitment of its amazing consultants. Though they come here from different backgrounds, and may use a variety of approaches to teaching, it is their commitment to individual, dialogic, and collaborative teaching that has made the Writing Center such rewarding and distinctive place to work. Many writers come to the University Writing Center thinking, or worrying, that what we will do is simply correct mistakes, because far too many faculty and administrators on campus mistake surface correctness for strong writing. Yet, when writers get here, what they find are collaborative conversations with our consultants where they work together to find out what it is the writers truly want to say in their own words, and in the most engaging and persuasive way possible. The approach we use, where we take our time, start with the writer’s concerns first, ask questions, — and don’t grade — makes this some of the purest teaching on campus. When writers leave after an appointment, they leave not only with new strategies for writing, but often with a greater sense of confidence as writers and students. We see these changes in writers’ identities reflected in our exit surveys and hear it in comments as people leave. People who know me have heard me talk about these ideas and experiences before, yet it is the changes in confidence, perceptions of agency, and in true learning that writers find here, that have meant so much to me over the past twelve years.

University Writing Center

The other aspect of the work here that I appreciated in our consultants has been the ethos, the disposition they worked hard to take into each appointment. What they did, in appointment after appointment with writers from every college and discipline, and with most kinds of writing on campus, was listen carefully, and respond with respect and care. In short, they treated each writer as a writer, and not simply as a draft to be corrected. They also never lost sight of the fact that writing is deeply connected to issues of identity and power and to teach in a recognition of and response to issues of social justice. It has meant so much to me to work in a setting where the teaching is grounded in theories and practices of hospitality, reciprocity, inclusiveness, and equity. We learned from writers and they learned from us. Too much of education is based in rigid standards and punitive assessments and we have worked not only to provide a different model for teaching and learning here, but to to try to use it when we can as a model for change in the University (And I just published an article about those efforts, if you’re interested). Teaching is an ethical and political project and I’m glad to have been part of what we have been doing here over the years to work to build on student knowledge and for intellectual exploration and knowledge building.

When I started thinking about this blog post I started thinking through some of the numbers that marked the past twelve years. There have been more than 55,000 appointments, more than 150 consultants and staff members who have worked here, more than 120,000 views of our online resources and videos, hundreds of workshops on writing issues, 15 dissertation writing retreats – and this is blog post number 425. Yet what those number really represent to me, what really makes me smile, is all the words, the ideas, the connections, that were started and sustained, because of work through the University Writing Center. It has been impressive, and often moving, to watch and I respect all the work the consultants and the writers have done together

A Place of Collaborative Accomplishments

There are programs and changes that have taken place in the last twelve years that I have helped facilitate and in which I do take some pride. We connected to graduate students, both in appointments and in workshops and dissertation writing retreats in new ways and greatly increased our presence in support of graduate student writing. We started an office down at the Health Sciences Campus and did both tutoring and workshops over the years. We created online resources from Writing FAQs, to videos and to handouts, to oral histories, for UofL writers but available to any writers looking for help. We helped design and move into a new space on the first floor of Ekstrom Library, to a larger, more flexible space that made us much more visible to the University community. And we did our best to try to find ways, despite increasingly shrinking funding, to nurture and support writing on campus and in our community through our writing groups, events such as International Mother Language Day and Open Mic Nights, and our community partnerships with the Western Branch Library and with Family Scholar House. We did our best to try to be a center for all writers

Our Old University Writing Center Space on the Third Floor of Ektrom Library

 All those accomplishments I frame with “we” because all the work that has taken place at the University Writing Center has been a collaborative project. It has been my deep good fortune to work with people who committed themselves to this collaborative vision of work, both with writers and with each other. So many people over the years came up with new ideas or showed me new ways to do things. They kept my thinking fresh, challenging it when it needed challenging. And, just as important as anything, they kept their sense of humor and warmth. It made this a fun place to work.

 I can’t list all the people who have worked here by name, but know that I am grateful to all of you, learned from all of you. But it is important to thank individually the permanent staff I’ve worked with. At the front desk and running the office, Robin Blackett, Amber Yocum, and Maddy Decker were the calm, friendly, and resourceful people at the front desk who set the tone for everyone who walked through our doors and reassured both anxious writers and weary staff. Also, I have worked with three associate directors, but that title is so misleading. I have enjoyed the great opportunity to have true working partnerships with these good and wise friends, Adam Robinson, Cassie Book, and Annmarie Steffes. All three of them provided the stability and professionalism to keep everything running. There was much more than that, however. They were always coming up with new and important ideas – and kept me from coming up with bad ones – and they were instrumental in shaping the positive and constructive emotional ethos among the consultants on staff. I once said we were co-pilots in all things Writing Center and it has always been true. I owe you all more than I can say.

Moving On and Changing Lives

In my years as director, people often have asked me how work was going. I would tell them that, even though I might be wearying of wading through administrative budget cuts and assorted other drudge, I still looked forward to coming to work each day. When I looked around me in the Writing Center, I would tell them, I see a group of people with a strong sense of community, doing the kind of teaching, learning, and caring that I wish were the model for the whole university. I will miss all of that when the next year comes around. I will miss working with the new group of consultants in the fall. I will miss the moment of a student writer stopping in my office to say that, in her mind, the writing center would be standing next to her when she received her diploma at graduation.

Still, it is healthy for institutions to have different people with different ideas and approaches in charge and the University Writing Center is positioned to have exciting times ahead under the leadership of Tim Johnson and Annmarie Steffes. As for me, I will be continuing to teach and to research and write about students’ experiences of the pandemic, climate change education, and participatory community writing projects. I’ll be around.

At the start of each academic year, when I talk to the new group of writing consultants at our orientation, I tell them about the writers who come to the University Writing Center, often anxious and uncertain, but leave both learning about writing, and feeling a stronger sense of agency and confidence. “Quite often,” I say, “We do change lives.” Certainly my time in the University Writing Center has changed mine. Thank you all. 

Capability and Procrastination: De-stigmatizing How We Labor

Kendyl Harmeling, Assistant Director for Graduate Student Writing

I had a lot of small, unformed ideas on what to write this blog post about. Knowing I had this task in advance, I spent the last few weeks musing over what I could spend the couple hundred words in this space discussing. My guiding question in these considerations was: what about writing, writing centers, process, or the UofL community feels most relevant and useful to reflect on here and now? I thought about potentially discussing campus trends toward the virtual and multimodal; or about the importance of both in-person and virtual writing communities; or exploring digital sustainability in debates on waste and AI. But amid all these thoughts on what to write – on how to use this space – I’ve been struggling in a combination of family-related emergencies and bodily/mental exhaustion. And now that it’s writing time, deadline day, I’m here with a few drafted-and-deleted ideas. In line with Andrew’s recent post on writer’s block, I offer here a play-by-play of my writer’s block, how I am processing it, and considerations on combating both internal and external stigma on “procrastination.”

A Mid-Morning Scene: As I write this, it is 12:48pm. I opened this document at 10:00am. I’ve played with the formatting, bolding and un-bolding potential titles, changing font sizes and adding page numbers to re-format them. A few times, I’ve gotten so lucky as to get a sentence or two on the page. But shortly after they appear, I revoke them. And I’m left with a blank page again. I read and re-read the UWC blog posts from this semester to see if there’s anything I have to add that’s in line with what’s already been talked about, or if there’s anything new to cover. I return to my blank screen and write some key words. But I don’t feel connected to them. I delete them, like their earlier sentence-ancestors I deleted a half an hour ago. I close my eyes and try to conjure a topic, or a gripping scene I can narrate into a more writerly discussion.

It’s been stormy lately – is there anything to that? Can I use the tornado sirens as a metaphor? Do I have anything to say? More times passes, and I un-bold and delete the placeholder word “title” from the top left corner. I take a short break to get water. I return to a still blank page because, shockingly, a ghost hasn’t appeared and begun to type for me while I was in the kitchen. The more time passes, the more anxiety I can feel in my fingertips and behind my ears. It manifests in the form of my heartbeat. Shame and embarrassment start to bubble up – others got their blog posts done, probably way more on time than me – why can’t I do this? END SCENE.

            When I was in undergrad, I used to plan to write my assignments just before the deadline to combat this feeling. If I had the most urgent pressure – less than 48 hours to produce a document – I could get my work done. And, though it wasn’t all the time, it was normally work that I was proud of once I had done it. I knew that my friends didn’t work like this, that their time management was better than mine by light years. Someone I worked with once shamed me for this, saying that it was not only my own personal failure to rise to the level of productivity that college work required but also it was a general issue of people my age. This has stuck with me for years, now in a PhD program and still unable to regularly and routinely get my work done “productively.” Notwithstanding discussions of neurodivergence, disability and ableism, and how these affect labor and capitalism’s expectations for productivity, this line of thought is toxic to hold yourself to and to hold others to more generally. It’s damaging, and even as I write this, I feel the echoes of that stigma attempting to shame me for writing this when I am able to – and not when a system or a social norm excepts me to.

            Not only are breaks important to take in academia and in any work environment, as Charlie’s January blog post implores, but too it’s essential to validate your work processes. I work how I work – and I get the work I need to do done in a manner that works for me. It is not a failure of my productivity to use what resources I have to complete a task. It is especially not a failure to use resources that social norms and capitalistic expectation stigmatize the use of. If you need to use time as a resource, it shouldn’t only be valid to use it in extension; tactically using deadlines to complete labor is just as useful to the person it benefits as planning labor out months in advance for someone else.

            In medical ethics and philosophy, there’s a concept called “the capabilities approach,” which is used to evaluate the equity and justice of medical access. The capability to access medical services is one step, but the functional ability to use them is another. This outlook on justice isn’t located solely in medicine – it affects every aspect of life. Take, for example, a wheelchair-user who needs to take the bus to get to the grocery store after a snowstorm. The city doesn’t shovel sidewalks, and though the bus is wheelchair accessible and there is a sidewalk for the individual to use to get to the bus, the city’s inability to shovel the snow and ice hinders this person’s functional ability to use the bus – despite the capability to do so that the bus lift and sidewalk offer them. The capabilities approach applies much the same to writing or work-related labor. Having the capability to write is one thing – and is expected of us as college students and workers. But having the functional ability, whether due to inaccessible processes or internal challenges, varies for each of us even down to the day. And, if we feel functionally unable to meet our capability, shame sets in. We must all work to validate, and not stigmatize, the ways we need to function in order to meet our capabilities – if that is what we want to do.

Abiding by someone else’s metric for function, for ability, for productivity and correct process is not a restorative approach to your own bodily and mental well-being. Further, holding others to your metric for function and productivity is ableist atop being reductive and stigmatizing. It also reinforces the harmful systems which already marginalize, disable, and exclude, let alone harms your relationships with those you’re not allowing to work in the ways that they need to. Everyone benefits when we are all not only allowed but encouraged to be “productive” in ways that we individually and communally make meaningful, despite the overarching capitalist social norm. We are not sustainable resources – we do not have endless wells of energy inside us, and we must tend to what we have with nurturing care. Do not burn out for this system, but work through it tactically. Be mindful of how your body and mind speak to you about your energy – and work how it feels most useful and helpful to you. I need to work close to deadlines – regardless of how many have and will tell me that’s wrong. I know my process and my work better than anyone, and you know yourself. Respect that process, restore your energy, and relax. Most importantly, know that however you labor is valid.

Using Your Voice: Why you Should Take a Risk and Write

Katie Fritsche, Writing Consultant

I know a lot of us sometimes think we don’t have a voice that matters to the world of writing. In fact, as human beings, we are sometimes so terrified of others finding out what we think, that we hide our poetry, our greatest work in the notebooks under our pillows and in our desk drawers, trying to work up the courage to share our voice but never really doing so because of what happens if people learn about the deepest part of ourselves: our thoughts.

In fact, you might be surprised to find that writing way back in the old days of Socrates, was not encouraged. Socrates once said that “When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support” (Kalantzis & Scope 1).  Socrates even himself criticized writing, and that there were dangers of lending our own voice to such a discourse, because after all, once it’s been written down, how can we undo it? How can we undo our voice that has been written out in such bold letters? Do we want to? Many critics might ask the question: it worth it for us to write, because isn’t there a danger that comes with putting our voice into something?

I would answer differently. I would answer that using our voice in writing, taking that risk, is important because we get to share the deepest parts of our lives with the world. To write with our voice is to help us feel human. To share our story is to become vulnerable, but it also inspires this creativity that drives us to become better through a written understanding of the world. Writing with one’s voice and sharing it seems like a big leap, but at the same time, I think it can be completely, truly said that if we don’t try, then we will never know. Such power exists from writing down our thoughts for the world to hear, it inspires healing for other people, it creates changes for us to network with others, and writing with our voice can even create future career opportunity that value the fact that we can think independently. I think that when we write, when we take that risk, whilst we may be opening up the doors to a lot of consequence, we are also opening up the doors to our future, because in this day and  age, we need people who aren’t afraid to be outspoken, to speak their minds, because writing is admitting we have the right to express who we are.

And so, I say write, write with your own unique voice, open those drawers, take the book of notes and pen you have hidden, and make an attempt to share that voice with the world. Be it through publishing peer review, writing groups, or simply scheduling a writing center appointment in person to talk about your writing, I encourage you to share yourself with this world. Socrates is wrong: writing does have value! Take your voice, let it fly, and write yourself into the future.

Works Cited:

Socrates on the Forgetfulness That Comes with Writing. Kalantziz & Scope, https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-on-the-forgetfulness-that-comes-with-writing.

The Importance of Reading the Syllabus and Assignment Sheets

Yuan Zhao, Writing Consultant

Not until recently did I notice that not all the students read emails, people tend to neglect group text messages, and I know most of you will skip this blog post. But please don’t apply such non-reading strategies to your syllabus and assignment sheets. In contrast, I suggest you read the following two types of documents—syllabus and assignment sheets—very closely.

For this term, in addition to working at the University Writing Center, I also teach one first-year composition class. This double identity gives me a lens to observe students’ reading behaviors to the abovementioned two documents and the possible inconvenient consequences. When opening a writer’s Writing Center appointment form, I usually see a writing draft uploaded by the writer, but not often do I see the assignment sheet. Even though sometimes, writers copy and paste parts of the assignment requirements to the appointment form, as a Writing Center consultant, I still expect more information relevant to the writing tasks. The in-person consultations are fine, but situations can be less ideal if it is a Virtual Writing Center appointment for written feedback. Without assignment sheets or writing prompts as references, it is hard for Writing Center consultants to decide whether the writing projects address or deviate from the expected topics. In consequence, Writing Center consultants can only pay more attention to local issues, such as the mechanism within paragraphs, transitions, topic sentences, formatting, and language styles, while it is comparatively difficult for them to give feedback on higher-level concerns, such as thesis statements, or whether the organization or evidence employed in the draft address the requirements of the writing task.

In the very first class of the first-year composition courses, I led students to read the syllabus and discuss the assignment sheets. But we all forget things, and forgetting is a process that we need to fight against, so after a few weeks, I did not feel surprised to receive student submissions that failed to meet the requirements of the assignment sheets. Some of them missed the due time without emailing me for an extension; some submitted a Google Doc link while the assignment sheet specifically required a Microsoft Word document; some seldom followed the required MLA or APA styles, collaging the font choice, spacing, margins, and headers/title pages. From their performance, I know they did not revisit the assignment sheets closely before submitting the papers. If students choose not to read the assignment sheets even before the due time of submission, when will they read them?

According to the course description for ENG102, one of the learning outcomes is that students’ writing should “analyze the needs of an audience and the requirements of the assignment or task.” Reading syllabus and assignment sheets closely is one crucial step to approaching that learning outcome. In addition, the first-year composition classrooms might be the first chance (and sometimes, the last chance) for a writing instructor to explain in the most meticulous manner the significance of different writing conventions and how they work in college. It means some instructors teaching intermediate or advanced courses might suppose students know well the basics of academic writing since they have completed the first-year composition courses. However, in some cases, students can fail their expectations. If some do not learn enough composition knowledge, I do hope they at least learn some skills to conduct learning—to know where to look for the assigned composition requirements. In fact, within the syllabus and assignment sheets, we can always find the resources that instruct us on what we should do.

Why Should We Read the Syllabus

A syllabus might be less directly relevant to writing tasks, but it is a framing document for the whole course where we can find detailed information. For example, some instructors allow extensions, while others can be very strict on the time to submit assignments. According to the details in the class policies, students can predict what kind of assignment writing strategies they can employ before submitting their projects. For another example, most syllabi contain a section for assigned reading lists. When reading the class plan and the list of assigned readings, students can notice clues for the course design, and sometimes can get themselves better prepared for the class by reading the materials in advance. In addition to the course policies, some instructors include various university resources in their syllabi, and as far as I know, most students skip reading them. For sure, it is not necessary to read them closely. Just a kind reminder, if you encounter some difficulties and need assistance at the campus, besides using Google or ChatGPT to look for answers, your syllabus often contains more direct answers for what you need.

Why Should We Read Assignment Sheets

If a syllabus provides us with scaffolding instructions on what a course expects us to do, what assignment sheets offer is often something more practical and manageable. For a particular writing task, reading prompts from an assignment sheet can inform a writer what topic they should be attentive to, what arguments they might head to, and what evidence or examples they should prepare. Reading prompts is more like conducting a reading comprehension quiz. Sometimes, highlighting the key phrases in the prompts can be very helpful. From the highlighted keywords, we can always refer to our class readings and see if there are potential connections we can make so that we can transfer them into writing. The assigned reading materials sometimes are great sources when students need to include evidence or examples, and some instructors prefer seeing students doing so. Their preference lies in that instructors know the reading materials well and it is convenient for them to provide more engaging feedback. In addition, if the assignment has some particular formatting requirements, please guarantee your writing project follows them strictly. Prior to reading your writing content, instructors read your paper format first. The formatting details from your writing often lead instructors to take it for granted whether you are serious about your writing. As a side note, you can also find useful information about format editing from the webpage of the University Writing Center, including the most updated MLA, APA, and Chicago styles.

Don’t Read Your Assignment Sheet Alone

Now, I assume you will read your assignment sheet closely, highlighting the keywords and checking the specific formatting requirements. I also understand that after applying the close reading strategies, you might still be confused about the writing tasks. Don’t leave the confusion unresolved before you embark on your writing. In addition to reading alone, you should read your assignment sheets with other people. First and foremost, whenever you find something unclear that needs further explanations in the assignment, you can always make use of instructors’ office hours to raise your concerns. Reading with your instructor who is also the author of the assignment sheet is the most effective approach to untangling the confusion. Second, you can read with your classmates. In fact, when you read the assignment sheets with your peers, you are doing something more than teasing out the requirements of the assignment sheets, since you are working as a literacy community. Since you and your peers know a lot about the course context, when reading the assignment sheets, why don’t you brainstorm for the writing task? Everyone can roughly share their writing purposes, outlines, resources and even discuss some practical writing strategies to address instructors’ expectations for the writing projects. By listening to your peers’ writing plans, you can build and revise your writing plans, too. Finally, you are always more than welcome to read the assignment sheets with the University Writing Center consultants. And I highly suggest you do so when you make an appointment with us. All of the consultants are experienced graduate students and some of us have teaching experience. Based on your verbal descriptions about the project and the written requirements from the assignment sheets, we can offer constructive feedback addressing your project, and hopefully, we can help boost your confidence to help you become a better writer.

Reading syllabi and assignment sheets cultivates important professional reading skills. It is the prerequisite condition to writing, which requires specific responses to meet the requirements of different tasks. The reading activity entails responsibilities as a reader, a communicator, an executor, and a writer. As a responsible reader, you have to read the materials closely; as a reliable communicator, you are expected to talk to different parties to make sure you understand the tasks; as an executor, you have to make decisions on what to write and how to write it; and as a dedicated writer, you compose a writing product as a response to a series of specific requirements. So start your writing by reading the syllabus and assignment sheets.

How to Write While Traveling

Elizabeth Pope, Writing Consultant

Traveling abroad and throughout the National Parks of the United States formed the bedrock of my undergraduate and graduate education. I began travel writing in my twenties, which consisted of a leather-bound journal that was tied with a string, rather than bound with a lock. The journal was an atlas of maps and keys of language that only I might understand rather than linear prose.  There were train numbers to catch from Zurich to Rome, Paris to Versailles, Munich to Amsterdam, and London to Stratford-Upon-Avon. At a bed and breakfast in the town where Shakespeare was born in Stratford-Upon-Avon, I—absent-mindedly—left my travel journal 20 years ago on a wooden table with lace doilies and a blush oil lamp.

There were names of objects that I stumbled onto in museums like a piece of the Berlin Wall that was spray-painted “Change Your Life.” There were scribbled streets that led to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris where Oscar Wilde was buried. There was a recipe for the traditional British breakfast that I ate the morning I lost my journal. Blood pudding resides in a crevasse of my mind that does not vanish—the way blood pudding looked blackened as a briquet of coal, eggs yolk-up and runny, baked beans in a tomato gravy, mushrooms sautéed, warm tomatoes, marmalade, and black tea. Names of ruins and eroding statues of goddesses within the fountains forming the roman streets led me back to gelato or mussels cooked in lemony saffron, wine, and saltwater at that restaurant down the street from the Colosseum in Rome—that I might never return to but recall through association of hunger that pulled me through landscapes.

I’ve often thought of the poem lost in those pages, left in England at the bed and breakfast, like an artifact for someone else to discover. I think of the map inside that journal that led to the restaurant in Interlaken, where cattle herds rounded the center of the city, where I shared Rösti, a giant pancake of potatoes—dripping in beer and butter—before hiking the Swiss Alps, before taking the Grindelwald Terminal (a sky-lift) to Jungfraujoch and the observatory, where snow whips in artic winds, where it’s impossible to walk in the wind at peaks of 11,000 feet above sea level. And it’s for that reason, I’ve never traveled with such a fine leather-bound journal again. A journal like that might eventually slip from fingers by negligence, wind, or distraction over long voyages with interchanges of trains, trams, sky-lifts, and airplanes; or while camping and hiking through rural and rough terrain.

Now, I travel with small notebooks and only write words, brief phrases, and maps that lead to impressions while in a specific scene to jog my memory. I practice presence while traveling. I refrain from a montage of pictures, but I do take photo journals of images that I wish to remember like the mirage restaurant with a wooden windmill and a ghost train that appeared after hours of desolate Icelandic rock and moss-scape through the passenger windows as we traveled from Sioux Falls to Badlands National Park. Or the sun setting over the Badlands when I wanted to remember eroding mountains as a monument to our ecological existence, the process of erosion by a river—the way the White River and Cheyenne River eroded millions of years of rock deposits to form a landscape that looks like an extraterrestrial glacial melt desert. Or the way the fossils felt as though they were crumbling under our feet as we ascended to one of the many summits that form the silhouette of the Badlands. I worked to remember that vantage were everything is exposed and eternal gorges with plates of rock form a superposition of coverings, as if to protect the oldest layers of earth. I worked to remember that the elements were careless. Exposed layers of earth in South Dakota disappear through harsh winters, thunderstorms that rock the sky with lightening and belt so loud it sounds like the earth is cracking, and winds that fall into themselves to form tornadoes that move through campgrounds to disappear as if they never existed.

I worked to remember bison from our time in South Dakota—its brindle coat that growths thick like an insulated wall to melt snow and subsist subzero temperatures, its head as beast-like as a minotaur, large as a rhinoceros, and royal as a lion arriving out of the visage of the grasslands in herds. I worked to remember the terror and electricity of standing close enough to touch a buffalo that wandered from the herd. The buffalo that walked beside my sister and posed for that one singular good photograph before the herd formed a wall in the road. High on adrenaline from such closeness, we blindly failed to consider that with a single bow of a horn that buffalo might flip us into air and trample us into the prairie dogs that kept peeping up like jack-n-the boxes.

Some images are hard to forget while traveling, especially when delays and detours occur. Like when the RV in front of us in the Black Hills lodged and stuck in the natural tunnel of the Needles, landmasses of granite that rise out of the mountains like cathedrals. The Needles ascend like petrified staffs of the gods and goddesses, or stalagmites. Traveling journal, in situ, shouldn’t be a novel of hours spent writing prose or poems. A travel journal should consist of signals, keys, places, names, and locations to remember to tell someone to visit. A travel journal should be shared so that others can locate the experience. Although there is never a replication of a singular experience, like the sunset we stumbled on while driving Wilderness Loop where we fed wild horses and wild burros in South Dakota. That sunset will never look or feel the same for the next person who visits that exact location any other time in history. In that sunset we were tired, dirty from camping, and enamored with the expanse of a landscape that we never knew existed before placing our feet on the ground and looking around.

 I kept a travel log to remember waking up our ragged, sleepy children from tree hammocks and tents at the campsite in Acadia National Park at 3 a.m.to watch the first sunrise hit the continental United States on Cadillac Mountain in Maine. It’s the coffee that I remember most around camp in the morning, bits of grounds floating in the aluminum percolator, coal dark coffee, the salt that forms on the rim of your skin when you wake beside the rock cliffs of Maine, the way the glacial lake steals your breath after jumping from the granite boulders forming the natural pools that rest in the Black Hills of South Dakota.  Travel logs are reserved for the moments you might be stuck in traffic or around a campfire when everyone is tired, dishes are washed, food is in bear-proof storage away from the tents and hammocks, and the everyone is too tired to eat the marshmallows they’ve roasted. Travel writing is a moment of reflection in mind, memory, word, or picture. It’s something that is written quickly so that you can revisit it again when you arrive home. Then, at home—when you’re sick for another adventure—that’s the time to unearth notes, pictures, and memories to piece together the trip.   

Ode to a Writer’s Callus

Wendell Hixson, Writing Consultant

When I was young, really young, I had a hard time differentiating my right from my left. I was a victim of the condescending phrase for the directionally-compromised: “your other left.” And no, the “L” and left-hand trick didn’t work. In the moment, the shape of the “L” would always escape me, so the left-hand trick was useless. I was a directionless little wanderer. However, due to countless lessons in cursive and my proclivity for writing way too much, I had quickly developed a writer’s callus. After seeing the little bump on my ring finger and asking about it, my parents told me that it had come from how I write with my right hand. Now, that actually stuck with me. From then on, I would always remember where my writer’s callus was, and I knew which side was my right. Luckily, I still have this little writer’s bump. I admit that I still use this trick and yield that, in the moment, I still forget what an “L” looks like. That’s against the point. This anecdote was really just a longwinded way of emphasizing an often ignored reality: writing is a physical experience, not just an emotional one.

For starters, how many people have a routine? And I don’t just mean a writing routine. I mean a routine for writing. I know, for me, that I need to be sat comfortably at a desk, a little chilly, in front of a window, and supplied with a sandwich and glass of water before I’ve entered into my ideal writing mood. While it’s good to learn how to effectively write in all situations, there is nothing wrong with having a personal routine that you employ to feel inspired and prepared. There’s also a lot of fun and comfort to be found in discovering what inspires you best. Remember, there is nothing wrong with treating yourself a little to some creature comforts before you write. Writing is intensive. It’s taxing. It’s vulnerable. It can leave you feeling exhausted, exhilarated, anxious, confident, confined, freed, or all of the above. It affects you, the writer, just as much as you affect the page. Sometimes this can even come at higher costs than we care to usually talk about.

As teachers, students, workers, writers, we all understand the reality of college. Most of us will stay up late, toiling over some assignment or research project, calling to the Muses in hopes that our blank page will suddenly fill with the words we need for an “A.” But, do we often enough acknowledge the toll this can take on our bodies? Writing isn’t a purely mental exercise, and—much like most physical exercise—shouldn’t be overdone. (I recommend also reading writing consultant Andrew Messer’s recent blog on burnout and writer’s block, as well as Charlie Ward’s latest blog on self-care.) Learn how to relax and find the proper times to make a daily “exercise” out of your writing, if possible. To further our metaphor, take time to exercise different aspects of your writing. Sometimes it’s good to simply write your papers, other times it proves useful to practice your skills in revising and editing, and other times still it’s good to remember that seeking guidance and even just reading are also wonderful ways to strengthen your skills.

However, writing shouldn’t be seen as all school-based work or business reports. I think that the most neglected physical aspect of writing, especially in school and the workforce, is how writing can also be for your own enjoyment. When we journal, when we physically write poetry, when we practice our 8 billion current forms of uniquely wonderful handwriting, we create a very personal little treasure. I recommend writing down something personal or something meaningful to yourself. Typing onto a screen, I believe, is extremely useful, but it can also separate us from what makes writings, books, and letters so wonderful. It requires a concerted effort to take a pen to paper and more effort still to preserve what has been created. Like a personal museum or library, in writing things down on paper, there is a compelling drive to keep it safe and able to be called forth at later dates. When writing letters, there is a valued and rewarding feeling in exerting so much effort on something that is to be given to another. It reminds us that writing has been commodified and streamlined, but it is, primarily, a work of art that we value as a record of our thoughts, feelings, and history. Is there not something endearing about a close friend’s own emotions and thoughts transferred to the page in their own distinctive hand? Is there not something rewarding about your lines of poetry or prose taking as much physical effort to create as mental effort? Is there not something meaningful in the simple thoughts we may have scribbled years ago about a wonderful day we’ve since forgotten?

At risk of overstaying my welcome, I want to stress that writing is always from and for you in some regard. It takes a lot out of you. Realistically, it will always be a demanding experience, but in the best way. So, try to always give what you can for school or work or what have you, but don’t forget that it’s your work. It’s your skill. It’s your effort that you pour yourself into. By creating and holding on to something tangible, you will also hold on to something that demonstrates the effort, the emotion, and the part of you that you had to give to create it. Hopefully, in realizing that you’ve physically created something so potentially meaningful, you can literally grasp how valuable and useful your writing can be. And, in the end—if you’re still not convinced—writing things down could make a little bump on your finger that might occasionally help with your rights and lefts, especially if you forget what an “L” looks like. Still pretty worth it, I think.

Writer’s Block: The Inevitable and Surmountable Adversity

Andrew Messer, Writing Consultant

Have you ever stared at a blank page for ten, twenty, or thirty minutes, the desire or need to write clawing in your head desperate to get out onto the page but you just can’t write it down? You can’t formulate or articulate the ideas in your head onto a page, typing away at your keyboard and then erasing the paragraph you wrote for some reason that you may or may not have made up? Me too: in fact, I’d wager that if you came to the University Writing Center at any given time of any given day of any given year and worked with any consultant that has ever worked there, they would have had the same problem. Even sitting here typing away at my screen I worry about it. Will my ideas flow? Will they make sense? Is this even worth writing? It is. I promise it is, and it goes away.

There is no magical way to get rid of it either, or if it is I am waiting just as patiently as the next person to be told what it is; however, I promise it is surmountable. And while there is no magic cure-all of sage, lavender, and bitterroot, I believe there are some strategies that I have developed over the years that have proven to be quite helpful in overcoming this small compositionary plague. So, if you have a minute or two, read on and I’ll impart to you my wisdoms.

Step Away

Charlie mentioned this in their last blog post on self-care, and I want to mention it here because I think it is an excellent piece of advice: step away, take a break. Even if you’ve just sat down to write, sometimes what the brain needs is just some time away. Go for a walk, take a nap (who cares if you woke up three hours ago), get a snack (or a meal if you haven’t already), or just do something that makes you happy. Mood and emotions are pivotal in how one goes about their writing process, and if you feel the weight of stress bearing down upon your shoulders while you stare blankly at the white rectangle on the word processor, then you likely won’t feel like writing. At least, if you’re like me, you won’t even feel like you can.

You can’t overlook the power of a solid break. It can be long or short, and that may very well be for you to feel out in the moment. But your brain is good at telling you what you need to do, and sometimes writer’s block is simply a way for your brain to tell you to step back, take a breather, and come back again once you feel more refreshed and invigorated. I know from personal experience how much more comfortable I feel working when I have done something for myself just before.

Read

It may sound deceptively simple, but I promise you it can work wonders. It can be helpful to take a break from your screen when you’re trying to write and you find yourself stuck, but when you do it might not always be the best idea to turn your attention to another—though there is something to be said for watching a show to calm down if you are panicking. However, I find that when I can’t quite put words to my thoughts, reading really turns the cogs in my brain much faster than any other stimuli.

And when I say read, I don’t have anything particular in mind. Sometimes rereading your sources can be helpful and can help you to materialize your thoughts; sometimes you need a break from the assignment altogether and you may feel yourself drawn to the novel you are reading. Either way it will get you away from the page and give you some much needed space from the intellectual work that is required of you—yes, that includes staring at a blank page trying to force your thoughts onto the page like you were technopath. And even if you haven’t started writing yet, this can be a helpful strategy to loosen up some thoughts and warm your brain up to the writing process even before the writer’s block has hit you.

Ask for Help

It’s never easy to admit that you need help, but sometimes it’s just what you need to get your ideas rolling. For me, I always like to have someone look over a draft that I am working on before I finish it. Even for this blog post, I asked someone I trust to look it over before I finished it! In my own experience writing can sometimes get stuck when I’m in the middle of working my way through it, so I highly recommend to get a second opinion when this feels like the case.

I promise this wasn’t just a way of making this a signpost for the University Writing Center, but it is an incredibly useful service chock full of excellent people who know the struggles of writing and writer’s block and can empathize with your own struggles. So, if you’ve thrown the kitchen sink at the problem and the page remains as blank as ever, try throwing the shower drain too and come see us. We’d love to help see you through it!