By Libby Bauman
During my first shift at the Writing Center, a writer ran in carrying a flying stack of notebooks and papers, extracted a few sheets from her pile, and thrust them forward, asking if someone could help her. I leapt from my seat at the main desk, a fresh new advisor almost as flustered as the writer, and took her to a table where we could work. I began with the usual pattern that seemed to work for other advisors. I asked the writer about her concerns for the paper (she was worried about everything). Then, we proceeded to read her writing out loud. I thought her paper was a solid start with plenty of sufficient evidence, but I noticed that the thesis needed tightening. The writer seemed to agree that the thesis needed work, and I breathed a momentary sigh of relief at finding a starting point.
That was the only sigh of relief I breathed all session. The writer was a freshman, and she was intensely nervous about her first college paper. Where I saw a solid start, she saw inadequacy. When I asked her about her current ideas for the paper, she told me that they were terrible and that she wanted to start over. Together, we tried to brainstorm, but she didn’t seem to like any idea that we came up with. Rather, she kept circling back to her belief that the paper was terrible. In the middle of reassuring her that it wasn’t, I noticed that she had started to cry. Unsure of how else to help, I offered her a tissue.
After a painful moment of silence, I asked her if she wanted to continue working on her paper. At first she did, but then she decided to leave it alone for the day and come back tomorrow. I encouraged this, realizing too late that I should have aborted all attempts at talking about the paper much earlier in the session since she was clearly not ready to discuss her writing. She needed to step away from it for a while and calm down. I myself stepped back and didn’t dwell on the ultimate failure of this session for a few days, hoping that the rest of my work in the Writing Center would not involve using the tissue box.
Now, I realize that my anxious writer needed a motivational response rather than a technical one. She needed to be told specifically what was working in her paper. Not every writer comes in ready to talk extensively about her work; some need extra encouragement. Having failed to provide this, I worried that I had scared my first writer away from the Center. When I looked in her folder weeks later, however, I saw a thick stack of appointment sheets from other sessions. My nervous writer had returned.
Libby is a sophomore Psychology major at Wittenberg University. This is her first semester tutoring at the Wittenberg Writing Center, and her favorite part of working there is helping inspire writers to take their papers in new directions. In her spare time, Libby enjoys writing fiction and drinking mint tea.