The document discusses using writing difficulties and anxiety as opportunities in the classroom. It can help classify challenges as normal, encourage intellectual challenge, and provide specific ways to explore writing more deeply. Exercises are presented that problematize difficulties, such as exploring creative nonfiction genres, deepening analysis, forcing reflexivity through questioning assumptions, and graduate student self-analysis of writing constraints. The approach aims to address difficulties by making them an overt subject for students to identify and wrestle with themselves.

1. Writing through Difficulties
Paul Barron
Sweetland Center for Writing
Fall Retreat
September 1, 2010

2. Problem
• Difficulties in writing and the resulting anxiety
can produce challenges useful in writing.
• Yet as incidental, difficulties and anxiety are
often experienced as negative.
• Affects some writers’ concepts of themselves as
writers and their attitudes towards writing.
• Writers are often unprepared to view these
challenges as productive.

3. Opportunity
Problematizing difficulties can help:
• Classify writing difficulties and anxiety as normal
• Encourage perceptions of intellectual challenge
rather than personal limitation
• Communicate expectations of rigor
• Provide specific entry points by which to explore
writing in greater depth

4. Classroom Context
One of many strategies, rather than a
single pedagogical stance
Used not only as metacognitive post
mortem (Why isn’t this working?), but also
to generate writing
Useful at several points of the writing
process, and across courses and student
populations

5. Sample Exercises
• Exploring genre: creative nonfiction
(LHSP 130, Eng 325)
• Deepening analysis
(across courses)
• Forcing reflexivity
(across courses)
• Grad student self-analysis
(Rackham workshop and DWI)

6. Exploring genre: creative nonfiction
Typical student responses, tabulated on the board
Benefits of the genre Limitations or pitfalls
Allows you to be creative Encourages you to be self-
Lets you combine different parts of centered
yourself (creative/scientific) It’s hard to know how to structure
Any subject could potentially be the writing, or if it’s working
made interesting Sometimes too much speculation,
More interesting for the writer, not enough hard information
learn about yourself Unclear how much detail can
Encourages your own voice safely be invented/reconstructed
Encourages you to take risks Potential for upsetting people
discussed in the essay

7. Deepening Analysis
A response paper assigned after the first draft of
a longer paper:
• From your essay, select a sentence or two that
represents the furthest you have taken your
thinking/analysis.
• Type this in bold at the top of a blank document.
• Write one page single-space elaborating upon these
statements.
• Don’t worry about paragraph or sentence structure (you’ll
be graded only on the depth of your thinking) .

8. Forcing Reflexivity
Everything happens for a reason.

9. Forcing Reflexivity
Everything happens for a reason.
Or does it?

10. Grad student self-analysis
See “Author Self-interview” handout
• Based on Nancy Wood’s TRACE*
(Text, Reader, Author, Constraints, Exigence)
• Grad students’ constraints often complicated
• Problems with writing often tangled or
misdiagnosed
• Offers a way to prioritize and problem solve
*Wood, Nancy V. Perspectives On Argument. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2002.

11. Final Thoughts
 Not an integrated approach so much as an awareness
(interrogating the pink elephants in the room)
 Valuable to let students wrestle with and identify the
problem themselves, thus
 The timing and context for making difficulties the overt
subject is important
 Maintaining students’ intellectual/creative space
 Focusing on posing intellectual problems rather erasing
difficulty