One day, while working as an Academic Support Center (ASC) Assistant at Berkeley College in White Plains, New York, I was tutoring a student named Chang, who had brought in an essay for me to help him with. I noticed that his essay had a substantial amount of awkward sentence constructions. In looking at one of these sentences, I wasn’t sure what he was trying to say, so I asked him, “What is it that you’re trying to tell me here? Just talk to me like you would talk to a friend.” He told me the idea orally, and I understood it. I then said, “Write down the idea the way you just told me.” He did. I then asked him, “Pretend you’re the professor. Which sentence do you think is the better one? The one you typed or the one you wrote?” He then said, “The one I wrote. It’s easier to understand. For some reason, whenever I write, I get really nervous. I think the professor’s gonna correct every single thing.” At that moment, my interest in researching writing anxiety was born, as students often face it with regard to their audience.
Writing anxiety is a topic that, sadly, has appeared infrequently in Rhetoric and Writing Studies (RWS) scholarship since the expressivist movement of the 1980s. Yet, when I talk to RWS faculty, as well as faculty outside the discipline, all agree that it is a topic worthy of discussion and further exploration. Throughout my years spent tutoring in writing centers and teaching in first-year composition and upper-division writing courses, I have encountered students who undergo high levels of writing anxiety. In collecting data for my dissertation, I worked with graduate students who faced writing anxiety, writer’s block, and other problems with the writing process.
My dissertation discusses these problems as pertains to graduate students, but it has larger implications for the RWS field as a whole. While the process/product debate appeared to disappear from the canon in the 1980s, I have discovered that many students and advisors in a variety of disciplines view writing as a product. Through my research, I hope to reintroduce Donald Murray’s notion of “writing as process, not product” into Writing in the Disciplines scholarship and examine it in this context. Such a reexamination has the potential to incite excellent conversation in this canon. Furthermore, it can help students and faculty in a wide variety of fields understand the idea and to apply it into their writing and advising practices, respectively. Potential exists for theoretical work, which discusses the idea, as well as qualitative work, which will see the idea applied in practical settings.
So far, one article has emerged from my dissertation, entitled "Writing Anxiety Groups: A Creative Approach for Graduate Students." It describes the idea of creating support groups for dissertation writers, and was co-written with Yuh-Jen Guo, one of my committee members, and Shu-Ching Wang.
Writing anxiety is a topic that, sadly, has appeared infrequently in Rhetoric and Writing Studies (RWS) scholarship since the expressivist movement of the 1980s. Yet, when I talk to RWS faculty, as well as faculty outside the discipline, all agree that it is a topic worthy of discussion and further exploration. Throughout my years spent tutoring in writing centers and teaching in first-year composition and upper-division writing courses, I have encountered students who undergo high levels of writing anxiety. In collecting data for my dissertation, I worked with graduate students who faced writing anxiety, writer’s block, and other problems with the writing process.
My dissertation discusses these problems as pertains to graduate students, but it has larger implications for the RWS field as a whole. While the process/product debate appeared to disappear from the canon in the 1980s, I have discovered that many students and advisors in a variety of disciplines view writing as a product. Through my research, I hope to reintroduce Donald Murray’s notion of “writing as process, not product” into Writing in the Disciplines scholarship and examine it in this context. Such a reexamination has the potential to incite excellent conversation in this canon. Furthermore, it can help students and faculty in a wide variety of fields understand the idea and to apply it into their writing and advising practices, respectively. Potential exists for theoretical work, which discusses the idea, as well as qualitative work, which will see the idea applied in practical settings.
So far, one article has emerged from my dissertation, entitled "Writing Anxiety Groups: A Creative Approach for Graduate Students." It describes the idea of creating support groups for dissertation writers, and was co-written with Yuh-Jen Guo, one of my committee members, and Shu-Ching Wang.
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Of course, I have to include my dissertation. If you can get through all 164 pages, you'll forever have a place in my heart:
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File Size: | 2465 kb |
File Type: | docx |