Tutoring in the writing center provides me with various opportunities to feel anxious before and during a given shift. Will I be able to accomplish what the student wants in the time we have together? Will I be able to respond adequately if the student brings up emotionally difficult content? Will my knowledge and experience as a tutor be sufficient for what the student asks of me? And most relevantly here: are there methods that can help the students I’m tutoring work through their own anxieties?
By Gabbi Guedes, Writing Center Scholar 2023-24
As a new consultant and former undergraduate writer, it is not difficult for me to imagine the anxiety that you may feel as you approach your writing assignments or come to the Center for assistance. You might be concerned about being able to accomplish everything you want within a limited time. You could be worried about exposing your writing to another person’s potentially judgmental eye. Maybe the content of your writing is very specific to your major and you’re nervous that the tutor might not be able to help you. While some of these anxieties may be specific to the Writing Center, some of them could relate to writing in any context and could have an impact on your ability to complete your assignments in the way that you want.
What is writing anxiety?
Writing anxiety can affect any stage of the writing process, whether it be before you start writing, while you’re writing, or after you’ve turned in an assignment. Writing anxiety refers to a wide range of symptoms that occur around writing, only some of which might be visible. Writing scholar Yuh-Show Cheng refers to writing anxiety as an anxiety “associated with writing, which involves a variety of dysfunctional thoughts, increased physiological arousal, and maladaptive behaviors” (2004, 319). Those three terms—dysfunctional thoughts, physiological arousal, and maladaptive behaviors—act as the typical categories that split up the different ways that writing anxiety appears in students.
Dysfunctional thoughts, or distortions, are negative feelings you have that exaggerate or even completely contradict things that might be true in your life. Those of you who think of yourselves as ‘bad writers’ are already falling victim to a dysfunctional thought. After all, what does it mean to be a "bad writer?" Is it that you have trouble putting your thoughts into words? Is it because you struggle with things like grammar or run-on sentences? Did a teacher tell you that you were a bad writer and then grade your work according to that belief? Are you writing in a language that you’re still in the early stage of learning? Even if all these things are true, that doesn’t make you a bad writer.
It is not said enough how difficult of a task writing is. Even the most unrestricted free-write activity requires you to organize lots of information in your brain and then figure out a way to translate that information into words that are meaningful to others. When you throw in a research component, that adds a whole other process of information gathering and citation practices that you then need to be familiar with. For multilingual writers, the burden is even greater to learn vocabulary and to work with a language that you may not have a lot of experience with. Even for those who learned English growing up, writing is a task that takes years of concerted effort to develop as a skill. That doesn’t mean that you should despair of ever becoming a good writer, but you should recognize that the difficulty of writing isn’t a reason to call yourself a “bad writer.”
Believing that you’re a “bad writer” can make you afraid of things that might happen because of your perceived inability to write. You might be worried about a bad grade even before you start writing or anticipate that during peer review or teacher feedback, you’re going to receive comments that confirm your negative beliefs. There are a couple things at play here: you are not nearly as bad a writer as you think you are, and most people also don’t think you’re nearly as bad a writer as you think that they think you are. I say “most” because there will always be people who criticize your writing for one reason or another, whether it’s because you write about something they disagree with or because your writing doesn’t fit the mold that they’re used to. And it is true that lots of people internalize a specific idea of ‘good writing’ from their time in school and then try to apply that logic everywhere without questioning it. But distortions exaggerate how you think other people look at you beyond what the actual truth is. Inevitably, the comments you get on your writing from your professors or peers won’t be nearly as bad as you think they’ll be.
Although dysfunctional thoughts focus more on your mind, “physiological arousal” refers to the negative bodily symptoms that can happen while you write. These include an elevated heart rate, shaky hands, or feeling your body tense up, all of which make writing more difficult. Such symptoms make writing an uncomfortable experience rather than something where you might derive joy. Students often don’t pay attention to how their bodies behave while they work. Usually, you figure out that there’s a connection between physical states (hunger and tiredness, for example) and your ability to work, but the analysis tends to stop there. You can learn steps to counteract when your heart is racing or your body is trembling, examples of which are listed at the end of this piece.
Paying attention to your body makes you more aware of your relationship to writing, which means also considering types of writing that you might enjoy rather than dread. For example, multilingual writers may find that while writing in a more familiar language is a neutral or positive experience, writing in English triggers a negative response in the body. One way to approach this is to think of writing like a test. If you take a test without studying enough, chances are your anxiety will spike while taking the test. Similarly, if you are lacking knowledge about certain elements of English, whether it’s missing vocabulary or a grammatical structure that you don’t know the translation for, that can cause distress during the writing process. Rather than judging yourself for difficulties you experience when writing, it is better to look for resources that can help make the process less stressful. The Writing Center is one possible resource. It is a space where you can write and talk about writing while receiving support on the parts of writing that you find the hardest.
Lastly, “maladaptive behaviors” in writing anxiety are actions that you take to avoid writing, including avoiding situations where you might be asked to write. Students who experience writing anxiety often want to evade the negative stimuli that come with writing and feedback. Anxiety about getting feedback on your writing can be especially paralyzing because it makes it seem like even if you grit your teeth and get through the pain of writing, all you are doing is setting yourself up for more bad experiences. Procrastination makes a lot of sense for someone with writing anxiety. It helps you avoid bad experiences as much as possible, condensing them down into a rush right before the deadline. The same goes for looking at feedback: putting it off until a revision deadline helps you avoid the feedback you dread so much, and if it’s feedback on a final draft, you never have to see it if you don’t want!
In both cases, procrastinating in this way does not mean that you are lazy, but it does mean that there aren't invisible factors keeping you from writing your best work. It’s easy to get into a negative feedback loop in your head about writing where you avoid it because you think you’re a bad writer, you put together something at the last minute, and then the feedback you get afterward confirms your belief that you’re a bad writer. You can take small steps to break out of that cycle, and you should be proud of yourself for doing so. Going to the Writing Center, even though it has its own anxiety-inducing elements, can be one of those steps. Just making and attending an appointment at the Writing Center is something worthy of being recognized as an accomplishment.
What can I do to address writing anxiety?
You can control whether you go to the Writing Center, but you should be kind to yourself when there are things outside of your control that worsen your anxiety around writing. If you’re already worried about your writing ability, getting an assignment you don’t understand or having experience with a professor whose grading system you don’t understand can make your writing anxiety symptoms more prominent. This is not me saying that the professor is always at fault for your writing difficulties, but rather that an important part of navigating writing anxiety is figuring out where there are places where you can intervene in the parts of writing that you can control. And even in this case, an email to the professor can do a lot to clear up misunderstandings and deal with one aspect of your anxiety. In more extreme cases, like life events that might be impacting your ability to write, it’s even more important to be kind to yourself. Better to be aware of the relationship between your life and your writing anxiety than to blame things like procrastination on personal failure.
So, how else can you intervene? The rest of this essay talks about different ways of dealing with writing anxiety. I cannot emphasize enough that working with anxiety is a highly personal process, and what works for some might not work for others. Although the following practices come from research and individual experiences, that should not be taken as a guarantee of effectiveness. Trying these practices means learning more about what works for you in terms of counteracting things like negative thoughts or physical symptoms, and that act of self-reflection is already a valuable process to be engaged in.
Reflective Writing
When students procrastinate, it is not always clear to them why they do so, which is why they might then default to calling themselves "lazy." However, there is always some reason or another why you don’t want to sit down to write, and untangling those reasons can be a major intervention into anxiety or other obstacles to your writing. Writing a reflection is valuable because it is writing that is completely for yourself. Nobody will ever see it if you don’t show it to them, which means nobody but yourself can judge it. And sometimes, the answer to the question “Why don’t I want to write?” can be more interesting than we imagine.
Affirmation
If you already have a sense of what is keeping you from writing, or you’ve done some exploring through reflection, it can be helpful to speak or write assertions that directly contradict some of your negative beliefs. This is especially helpful for writing anxiety because, as I’ve discussed before, it causes you to have exaggeratedly bad thoughts about your writing and other people’s perception of it. It can be surprisingly difficult to affirm beliefs that are opposed to thoughts that you’ve had for a long time, which can make it even more rewarding when you manage to do so. It is not that saying “I am a good writer” will make you an excellent writer, but it may help you negate the opposing belief that is keeping you from the practice that develops the skills of a good writer. It is also helpful sometimes when other people provide those affirmations. Taking your writing to the Writing Center, for example, gives you a chance to hear someone else talk about your strengths as a writer and combat negative self-perceptions.
Grounding
Grounding refers to a variety of techniques that can be used to calm the body from an agitated state. If you notice symptoms like an elevated heart rate or hand tremors while writing, using these strategies can help settle your body down and put it in a better state for a complex task like writing. Deep breathing is a classic example of a grounding technique. People with anxiety often use a variation called “square breathing” where you breathe in, hold your breath, breathe out, and hold your exhale, each for the same amount of time (usually four seconds). Other examples include naming things that you are currently experiencing with each of your senses or doing a mental exercise where you name as many instances of a category as possible, like animals or rhyming words.
Intermittent Rewards
Although writing anxiety can hit even for small assignments, it can be especially burdensome when you have to write a longer assignment. Even if you tell yourself that it might be better to space out the work, it can feel like you’re just prolonging your suffering and that you’d rather do it all at the last minute. Intermittent rewards intervene by giving you a positive experience every time you accomplish a smaller goal, like writing a certain number of words or doing one step of a task like outlining or revision. The more specific and repeatable the goal, like word count or time spent, the better. Rewards can be anything within your reach, and they will vary depending on the person. Some people might like an edible treat after each of their goals are completed, while others might prefer to play an online game or window-shopping online. The key is to find a reward that keeps you invested and helps you associate writing with positive rather than negative outcomes.
As I said earlier, these techniques might not work for you, or they may all work to different extents depending on the person. However, I hope learning a bit about writing anxiety and its treatment helps you understand your writing process a little more and gives you an opportunity to act more toward your own well-being, while also producing writing you can be proud of.
Even as someone with much more writing experience than I had as an undergraduate, I still experience various symptoms of writing anxiety when I work on projects. But learning about writing anxiety was incredibly empowering and helped me not only with the quality of my writing but with making sure I write in a way that works for me.
Further Reading
Handout on Writing Anxiety from The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/writing-anxiety/
“Writing Papers Makes Me Anxious!”, blog post from Go Ask Alice, produced by a team of health professionals at Columbia University: https://goaskalice.columbia.edu/answered-questions/writing-papers-anxiety/
“Writing Anxiety,” web page from Berkeley College Writing Programs: https://writing.berkeley.edu/news/writing-anxiety
Handout on Writing Anxiety from the Writing Center at Madonna University: https://www.madonna.edu/resources/writing-center/online-tutoring/WritingAx.pdf