Dear Gloria,

Motivation is (the most) important in what we do.

Motivation is partly conscience, partly hidden for ourselves.

Motivation becomes intrinsic when it's driven within itself.

The power in writing and creativity lies in what drives us - all the rest is technical - en technical things can be learned.

Motivation to overcome anxiety - could be a nice way to start writing.

The Best,

Willy

I experience some of this anxiety when submitting to a high profile journal. I just humble myself and heed the review comments from the blind peer reviews, which very often help to improve the paper.

Many thanks,

Debra

Hello, Debra,

The best advice when I went through grad school was to read mission statements of publishers or departments that you are writing a letter to join and echo their keywords in some fashion. Show how you will advance their aims as well as highlight your own points in the specific case you are making ( a study or whatever.)

Thanks, Dikabar Pal, for your answer.

I have given extra class credit for students with low self-esteem if they did some exercises in Cynthia Arem's text

Conquering Writing Anxiety .

Dear Gloria,

Motivation is (the most) important in what we do.

Motivation is partly conscience, partly hidden for ourselves.

Motivation becomes intrinsic when it's driven within itself.

The power in writing and creativity lies in what drives us - all the rest is technical - en technical things can be learned.

Motivation to overcome anxiety - could be a nice way to start writing.

The Best,

Willy

nobody. I learned most of my mother who wrote the required texts for me, on this way I learned much with such system of modeling.

Writing is an art that must be learned before gaining mastery. Reading and taking notes of the diacritics of good writing of scientific papers while availing oneself to workshops, courses and seminars on good academic writing are equally helpful.

Thanks to Colleagues Van Buggenhout, Ritter, and Adom,

Your varied thoughts are all welcome and I give consideration to each.

In reply to the Van Buggenhout post, I am forced to think that the substrate of motivation is often the level of self-esteem. The variability of motivation is merely one manifestation of a level of self-esteem.

Even if we have the experience--real or imagined-- of someone humiliating us in a way unrelated to creative output, there is some impact because our general self-esteem has been affected. Or the perceived injury to self-esteem even unrelated to writing can cause a general reactive sour mood that may get in the way of creativity. Make sense?

I have a more fine-tuned question that straddles both writing and psychology. Is it possible to separate general depression or lack of self-esteem from writing anxiety?

If depression or lack of self-esteem are lessened will writers produce more?

Is writing performance large a dependent variable of self-esteem (allowing that other inhibiting factors are accounted for such as having any time to give to writing)?

Have you tried to list factors coming between you and writing or surveyed students as to why they cannot write?

Occasionally a student will honestly report that writing is not so important or deserving of time and work as "real subjects" like Business Law or Calculus. Then the low esteem is on the subject, not self-esteem.

However, science and law professors will report that they have far too many students who do not communicate well.

From WPA-L….

Validation from external sources only matters insofar as I am paid to write and I like cashing those checks from publishers, but I am personally never satisfied with my columns, blogs, scripts, or anything else I write. I constantly note in my journals that I should stop writing and find another path forward since others write much better than I do. 

As for others reinforcing this self-doubt, that would be all but a few editors, producers, and directors. Being berated for everything I wrote was the norm as an undergraduate. I spent much of the summer shredding the papers from USC on which TAs and professors had offered such useful feedback as “How can you be this f-ing stupid?” Other great feedback included, “Clearly you haven’t read the works” (I had) and “You don’t know anything about farmworkers or their culture” (despite being raised by a grandmother who was a citrus laborer). 

By the time I finished my undergraduate studies, what I had internalized was that professors and TAs knew less than I did. And they were jerks. 

Do I feel any better about my writing? Not really. I don’t believe anything I do is “good enough” and that’s a daily struggle that was ingrained from an early age. Being called stupid, ignorant, retarded, and so on, left residual doubt and inferiority on my psyche. 

What I do know is that without writing, I don’t have the opportunity to tell students and teachers how horrible some educational practices were and remain. Writing is my rebellion and my fight to reclaim some confidence. It has been that since first grade. 

And like most writers I know, I will regret my choices within this message and wish I could revise it 100 times or more. 

Self-esteem? Any assumption that I have any self-esteem is based on a reaction to a self-defense mechanism for survival. What people mistake for confidence in writing or any other task is really my own desire to continue until I finally create something good enough. 

-------

Like many students, I started to search for the courses with the clearest, most rigid grading criteria. “Writing” became a euphemism in my experience for “cultural awareness” in a white-upper-middle class sense. There were two versions of this, one that required you understand the self-assured confidence white-collar parents teach their children and the other was the over-coming marginalization narrative, composed in the language of that managerial class. 

Writing scared me because it then meant a good grade was linked to words and phrases I would never had heard as a child and had not mastered. Writing meant knowing the norms of a culture to which I did not belong. Writing was part of this:

https://www.vox.com/2017/9/11/16270316/college-mobility-culture University of Cincinnati psychologist Shane Gibbons, who has researched this topic and counsels first-generation students, said these students are often raised by parents who have working class jobs — and in those work places, being assertive or individualistic can get you fired. "I think that experience of the parents' workplace is transferred to children," he said. "There's less of challenging of authority figures, but to some professors that looks as if the student isn't trying." In addition, research shows that first-generation students tend to go to school for different reasons. An annual UCLA survey finds that first-generation students are more likely to go to school because their parents pushed them to do so — and because they see it as a way to ultimately get a job and support their family. In contrast, middle- and upper-class families instill very different values from an early age.  Sociologist Annette Lareau followed dozens of children for a decade and found in her 2003 book, Unequal Childhoods, that more privileged children tend to be raised to reason with and question authority.  She named this parenting style "concerted cultivation," and found that the skills that these children develop translate well to a middle- and upper-class environment. And it's those people who fill the quads and administrative buildings on college campuses, and they come with a certain worldview about how successful humans should act. This is also true of second-tier schools, where students come from less affluent backgrounds, but administrators still come from upper-middle class backgrounds and exhibit upper-middle class expectations.

Professors who called me names and insulted me were responded to a cultural norm. My father (a nurse) and my mother (a classroom paraprofessional) would never have questioned their superiors: doctors, teachers, etc. There was a deference to authority, deeply ingrained. And the argumentation skills are not the same for a first-generation student as for the child of the managerial class. 

Math and science were my safe spaces, where I could ace any test, score perfect, and know I could defer to the professor. The text was (generally) correct, and if you did spot a mistake, you could ask politely and the professor or TA would check the math or code. 

Writing? These were horrible classes of heated debate, which left my stomach aching and my head throbbing. I’d leave at breaks and not return. I’d do anything to not take a writing course, the entire time I had been writing for the local newspapers since high school. Writing fills hundreds of journal pages and bins in my basement. I never stopped writing outside the classroom - but I have nearly no confidence with academic genres. The anxiety paralyzes me, enough that I sought out an educational therapist to help me with my focus to pass the writing classes on areas for which I was already a professional writer! 

The therapist worked with a doctor, who prescribed various medications. They resulted in hyper-focus and some really good weight-loss, but they didn’t help me actually complete assignments without panic. Still, I was riding my bike 100 miles a week in the mountains!  Pushing through the MFA started in 2004 and ended in 2017. That’s a long time to struggle with the format of peer review and instructor feedback in writing and creative courses. The feedback was brutal, and often done in front of an audience. 

Little tiny class markers in the writing class reminded me of my isolation. I hadn’t been to live theater, a concert, a museum, et cetera, until I was an undergraduate student. I hadn’t taken vacations to interesting places. My world wasn’t the one reflected in writing prompts, assigned readings, or the activist pedagogies of some professors. My goal was to get a job and help my family and community. Period. This entire “self-improvement” thing? Not something to which I could relate. 

Classmates talked about taking a year off to travel. They went places during summers. Their writing mentioned people, places, and ideas that were foreign. And when a reading was supposed to be about experiences like my own, I wanted to shout, “Hey, that author knew he/she had a safety net. That’s not the same as being poor, with three generations in a one-bathroom house. Not the same at all.”

Writing courses still scare the heck out of me… and I teach writing. I constantly worry if I’ve become what I dreaded. The unintentionally elitist professor who judges students unfairly because they defer to my authority or that of peers. “Speak up! Take a stand!” These are not so easy.  Even in my doctoral program, I dropped a couple of classes that felt like Utne Reader Salons for the secretly initiated. The anxiety of writing the “right way” and expressing the “right” views was paralyzing. I could barely put a couple of words to page without hyperventilating. It wasn’t healthy, so I found classes like, “Writing in the Sciences” to reduce the stress.

When you worry you need a specialized therapist to pass writing courses, maybe the courses are the problem?

Thanks, Colleagues Ben and Christopher,

I appreciate Ben's insights into the process of writing with an editor commercially. This bridges the old "town and gown" divide. In writing classes some students really perk up when they write practical texts for professional or trade publications.

And Christopher, I want to thank you for coming on RG and bringing your posts from the WPA-L list to share. We have only the vaguest notion of what 1st gen college students experience, the farther we are from that personal experience. I read the article linked to your post by the psychologist. The data backed up the cases cited very well. There simply are different cultures and feelings of marginalization that get overlooked, esp. if race is not an issue ( but sometimes even if it is.)

Feelings of self-worth and being part of a group--a colleague--are very important. Those who enjoy these privileges can really learn from those who have not been in the same inside position or are hanging on for dear life on the margins.

Dear Gloria, thank you for the question, and our colleagues for the answers!To me, writing is the most important and valuable skill (to my American friends and to our MSU colleagues). Since 10 I ( and my creative students) have been writing and publishing. Nobody has told me it's wrong. If it's profitable for the powerful, they won't touch the creative individuals. It will continue as long as the creative personality is outside the area of money, career or awards. As a rule, a creative personality doesn't write for glory or money. One enjoys immensely the intellectual-emotional process of writing. It's a kind of intellectual pleasure. and a replacement. I was punished neither for my humanistic concepts, which had been one step ahead, nor for my frank essays, nor for my inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural scenarios. Creative personalities are benevolent, open and generous. They say,"It has been written, and it is forgotten...There are a lot of new ideas!"A creative personality doesn't lose his/her inspiration even in a personal failure, lack of time, misery, tragic loss or even in the authoritarian system with its methods, that were gained by it through many years. They live in their own ideal world, in the world of imagination, beauty and fantasy of their human spirit. As a rule, their works are used, stolen, appropriated or ignored...If a human being is able to write, it means, that he/she isn't pinned down enough. Nevertheless, every dose of hatred, violence, and injustice has its own cumulative effect, and in the long run, the system like avalanche will fall on the head of the creative personality to press him/her down.

In the U.S., Great Britain, among other countries "professional editing companies" abound. What do you think of threse serviced as you approach your next writing project (alone or with others)?

Dennis

Dennis Mazur

Only those who do not want to hear what I have to say.

i think if i have authentic self-Efficacy i do every thing Regardless of who questioned my abilities

Thanks for your answer, colleague Mohammed Abdallah Turky. I wish you well!