Editor’s note: We would like to thank Li Qi Peh, Lecturer at the Princeton Writing Program, Princeton University, Princeton (New Jersey), for providing this piece. She worked at the Columbia University Writing Center in Spring 2020. To contact the author, please email Li Qi Peh. If you would like to share your writing center’s experience during COVID-19, please submit via WLN.

                            Li Qi Peh

When our writing center consultations first moved online in March, what I was most concerned about as a writing center consultant was how I could best manage the anxiety of the writers I worked with. After all, our routines had been thrown into chaos, but deadlines for assignments and job and graduate school applications remained more or less the same. The process of writing, so difficult before, was now even harder.

For writers wrestling with sentence-level issues, this anxiety, I realized, frequently took the form of the request for proofreading. Those hoping to work primarily on issues of structure and argument hoped that I could quickly correct grammatical errors during the first read through so we could get to talking about “meaning” instead of “form,” while writers most worried about their grammar only wanted help with that alone. Either way, writers were eager to temporarily surrender control of their writing to buy some peace of mind.

Of course, requests for proofreading are not new, and many of us are trained to gently turn them down in favor of working together with writers to figure out a grammatical rule or what they are really trying to say. In times like these, however, a tiny bit of proofreading can be a form of care, and more importantly, the start of a fruitful conversation about how to find and fix errors in one’s own work. I found that by reading aloud and correcting the errors in the first two paragraphs of their essays, I could carve out time for writers who were anxious about their grammar to take a mental break, settle into our sessions, and begin learning in a low-pressure way. Armed with a brief run-down of grammatical conventions and some knowledge of the repeated errors they were making from my quick proofreading, the writers I worked with could then attempt to fix the errors in the rest of their essays on their own.

To scaffold these later attempts and reassure writers that they were not being left to flounder, I typed the grammar rules and conventions we had learned from my initial proofreading straight into the documents we were working with, often in-between or even within paragraphs. I did so not only for ease of reference, but also to visually remind writers that their essays were works-in-progress to be manipulated and taken apart. Introducing a little chaos into their essays encouraged the writers I worked with to take a stab at bringing the rest of their work to order. More importantly, the few grammatical conventions I typed out served as a useful springboard for larger conversations about resources writers could refer to to improve their work and why they made the grammatical, rhetorical, and argumentative choices they did.

The act of proofreading, then, does not necessarily remove independence from writers, especially in these uniquely stressful times. Sometimes, a little proofreading—and handholding—can empower writers and provide them with the energy to look at their essays again with fresh eyes.