By Emmet Stone
Perhaps the largest problem in any writing assignment is not finding what to say, but actually saying it. Putting words on paper can, for some people, be difficult because of self-doubt and perfectionism. Others have conflicts regarding left and right brain communication, in which either their analytical or creative impulses dominate the writing process. This is not to say that perfectionism and right and left brain competition are automatically problematic. But, left unchecked, these traits can disrupt the flow and quality of students' writing. These disruptions can manifest themselves in a variety of different ways, including writer's block and fact babbling. In either case, it is a writing assistant's job to help students fill in the blanks.
Perfectionism
This is first major reason for flawed writing. As you may know, perfectionists are typically concerned, if not obsessed, with doing a task correctly the first time. I, myself, am a mild perfectionist, preferring to turn in papers as the first and final draft. Perhaps we see the need to revise as a sign of weakness - that, if we cannot write a paper perfectly the first time through, we are liable to be devoured by other, more important tasks. Although taking pride in one's work is a noble thing to do, staying up until the break of dawn to finish even minor papers can be a hazard to one's health, which, ultimately, is far more important than almost any undergraduate assignment.
Of all the curses that afflict perfectionists, writer's block is, without a doubt, our bubonic plague. There is no way of describing the absolute dread and helplessness one feels when confronted with a half-finished sentence or paragraph, especially when the roadblock is a piece of vocabulary. Unfortunately, there is nothing one can do about vocabulary issues other than browse a dictionary or thesaurus. Missing ideas and complete thoughts, however, can be helped.
Perhaps the best piece of advice I can offer a perfectionist student or a fellow writing assistant is this: say whatever you want to say and, once the idea is written down, go back and rewrite the idea into a complete sentence. This may sound like a free-write, but it is not quite so complicated, as it can be done in the middle of a paper. Just write a thought down as a sort of stream of consciousness. It can be full of profanity, incoherent sentence fragments, or anything else as long as it is appropriate to the subject at hand. After it is on the page, look at it and see how or if it relates to anything that comes before it. The real trick here is making the writer's thought processes visible.
Perfectionists usually have some sort of self-restraint mechanism or a little voice in the back of their minds, saying, “No! Don't say that! It's Stupid!” Getting a student's thoughts on paper is the key to unlocking and disengaging that annoying little device. Once the device is turned off, all that remains is forming the thoughts into a coherent sentence. Ordinarily, I would not offer this advice to students; it is generally a good strategy to keep writing, and not revise as one writes, because it tends to turn on that self-restraint mechanism. However, in the case of staunch perfectionists, who are going to write and revise at the same time anyway, the goal is to speed up their writing process, so they will not need to rush through the paper at the last minute. Even with people who love a deadline, a little bit of leeway can make a world of difference.
Babbling
Another trait that can seriously affect the quality of students' papers is the competition between left-and right-brained thinking. As Jude Todd presented in her workshop, a person's brain is split into two hemispheres. The right side controls creativity and left controls cognitive and analytical processes. Normally, the cooperation and competition between the two hemispheres is completely normal and healthy because it keeps people safe and balanced. When engaging is academic and intellectual activities, such as writing papers, the two sides can come into an unproductive conflict. This is when fact and opinion babbling happens.
In more familiar terms, writing an academic paper while under the influence of hemispherical competition is like feeding a cat. There is dry food, which is facts and hard evidence, and there is the juicy, meaty food, which is equivalent to creative insights and opinions. If we give too much dry stuff, our audience is informed, but not interested. If we give too much meat, they are interested, but not informed. If we give too much of anything for an extended period of time, we run the risk of our audience rejecting the whole piece, despite its merits.
The Left Brain
Fact babbling is the practice of writing down all the facts, but providing little or no context in which to put them. Although it can be helpful in the brainstorming stage, fact babbling in the paper itself is destructive. One example of a fact babbled paper is one that my student brought to one of our first sessions. In every paragraph, even his thesis, he had about three direct quotes with maybe one or two sentences of explanation and opinion. With so many hard facts pockmarking it, his paper read more like a police report than the exploration of opinion the prompt asked for.
The first step in this paper's recovery was to thin out the quotes and blend them with the sentences around them, a fairly simple task. The next step was a bit more complicated because I had to think like a detective and understand the way my student thought about writing. After some deliberation, I found that my student's problem was a tendency to think of writing as the accumulation and placement of relevant facts - a left-brained task. This, however, did not leave room for the creative process. So, after we thinned the quotes out, I took the paper, hiding the text from my student, and asked him what he thought about each quote on a creative and personal level. He did not need to write anything down for this exercise because, once I gave him the paper back and he saw the quotes again, he could easily fill the space before and after the quotes with relevant and insightful commentary.
Another example of the danger of left brain thinking is the digitally-minded student. When I recently observed one of my classmates' tutoring sessions, I noticed that the student - who, appropriately enough, is a Computer Science major - tended to think of writing as an equation. He kept asking about structure rules and conventions of grammar and diction. Normally, questions from first-year students about structure and word placement should be applauded, especially when the student is unsure how to form a readable thought. However, in this case, the student seemed to be looking for a surefire way to write an excellent college-level paper. As many of us have experienced, writing an “A” paper is a process that cannot often be broken down into individual steps. Rather than a digital, formulaic process, writing, even academic writing, is more of a creative, analog process that has more in common with painting or sculpting than mathematics. If I had to mentor this student, I would have him close his books, leave them in his room, and walk with me around campus. I would bring a tape recorder and tell him to say what he thought about the readings and the assignment, in general. Afterward, I would compare his speech with the idea of a formulaic writing style, pointing out that successful communication does not necessarily need to be ordered by strict rules. Of course, if some students work and write better with a lot of structure, then more power to them. However, if a student is obsessed with structure, more difficult and abstract assignments could bring their writing process to a screeching halt.
The Right Brain
On the opposite end of the spectrum, one can take an excessively right-brained approach to writing papers. For some reason, I find that this is a less common occurrence, possibly because high schools tend to discourage rants and bombastic soliloquies. When I do see something written without any facts or concrete evidence, the perpetrators tend to be either artistically inclined students, who are worried more about form than function, or students who are on their last legs after writing four major papers in a weekend. Although there is nothing we can really do to help the tired people - except, perhaps, providing them with a sedative and telling them to get a good night's sleep - we can help the overly creative people by doing the opposite of what I did with my temporarily left-brained student. We can take the paper from them, read one of their opinions, and then ask where they saw something like it in the books they read. Once they find appropriate quotes, we turn the students loose and let them integrate the quotes into the paper as they see fit.
Hemispherical competition, like perfectionism, can also create a form of writer's block. Although not as crippling as fact babbling or the type of writer's block that comes from perfectionism, competition-fueled blockage can halt a student's writing just long enough for his or her babbling tendencies to bubble to the surface. Sometimes, when posed with an equal opportunity to provide either more opinion- or logic-based rhetoric, or more hard evidence, my concentration slips and my self-correcting mechanism kicks in. I will keep asking myself what sounds or fits better in the context. Should I be creative and witty, or strong and serious? Where do I go from here? The trick to overcoming this problem is to stop it before it starts by knowing the assignment. This means thoroughly reading the prompt, clarifying any uncertainties with the professor(s), and talking to classmates about their approach to the assignment. Once I can classify the nature of the assignment as left- or right-brained, I will have a good idea where I am going, and will be less susceptible to stop and argue with myself midway through.
The perfectionists and the left- and right-brained people are only three types of students a writing assistant may encounter. Often, traits will be mixed, so that an assistant may come across a left-brained perfectionist, obsessed with getting everything factually accurate, precisely structured, and logically fine-tuned. Or, one could encounter a right-brained perfectionist, concerned with aesthetic and rhetorical flow, emotional power, and cutting humor. Because all students are different, and positive and negative traits are often mixed, the problems with papers may not always be so cut and dry as simply writer's block or babbling. What I find works best to combat problem writing is to keep a core group of strategies, like the ones I described above, that can be easily adapted to differing styles and personalities. After all, is it not a writing assistant's first job to know his or her student?
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