Peer review day. If it’s anything like my experiences, nerves are on edge, tensions are high, partners are found, and suddenly all eyes are on the writing. Crunch time. Sometimes professors will ask each person to look at just one peer’s work; sometimes they must find multiple partners to swap with. Reviewing others’ work has often felt claustrophobic for me as I juggle in my mind thoughts on the paper, worries about whether I am being too lenient or too harsh with my comments, and management of the ever-shrinking time allotted, especially when there are other pieces to get to afterwards. However, it has taken me years to understand that the way I was studying the writing my peers presented me may very well have been making the ordeal even more tricky. Learning to pull myself away from line edits in order to digest the broader organization and themes has enabled me to better critique writing.
The exercise of line editing came naturally to me as I traversed English classes in grade school. One of my favorite things about writing has long been stringing together sentences with what I saw as a rhythmic flow, all the while keeping a watchful eye on my adherence to grammar rules. In fact, I would often forego an outline when working on an essay, instead thinking out each sentence as I went. Thus, as I came to value these sentence-level concerns in my own writing, grammatical minutiae, flow, and sentence clarity were often first and foremost when I scanned papers that others shared with me. It helped, of course, that these things are some of the first that one notices when reading through a piece, by nature of the act of reading itself. This tendency became a problem, however, when I became so bogged down searching for and correcting small things that I was unable to examine more structural issues found in papers.
It was only through stepping into several roles at UMBC that demanded proficiency in deeper analysis of writing that I realized what a hindrance my habit had become. I first experienced that reckoning when I became the editor for the Opinions section of the Retriever. In editing the articles that writers for the paper submitted, I would sometimes reach the end, having left notes on sentence-level grammar and clarity errors throughout, and realize I barely remembered anything about the actual points being made. Needless to say, after that first reading I seldom had the multiple commendations and constructive criticisms that I was asked to comment on the articles. In the same way, I noticed a focus on localized issues limiting my ability to actually judge the merits and downfalls of student writing when I was grading essays submitted as part of the class for which I served as a team leader. Finally, as if being forced to assign number values to characteristics to which I often paid too little attention wasn’t bad enough, training as a writing tutor has made me even more intensely aware of my need to make my focus more global. The time constraints imposed by sessions in the Writing Center simply do not allow for dilly dallying; I am forced to prioritize.
Though I am still a work in progress regarding this problematic tendency to hyper-focus, I feel that learning to prioritize is, indeed, the key to analyzing writing more effectively. Some students come to the Writing Center for the express purpose of having their grammar and sentence structure critiqued, in which case I will happily oblige; peers may ask for similar advice. However others may seek more general feedback, and with only thirty minutes per session in the center I must frequently direct most of my energy toward bigger-picture concerns.
One strategy that I find helpful is to break down any barriers to communicating authentically about the balance I am trying to strike. Upon noticing issues at the level of individual phrases I will merely ask the student if they would like to stop and analyze localized issues such as grammar, and I let their reply inform the direction the session takes from there. Another skill that I have found important is the ability to make any line editing that does need to happen as efficient as possible. If the same issue is repeated — for instance, commas placed outside of quotation marks for every quote throughout the paper — pointing it out just a couple of times may prove more effective than marking each instance of the error. Not only does this minimize the time that I have to spend editing for that particular issue; it also forces writers to find the unmarked instances themselves, increasing the chances that they truly come to understand why those spots were in err and avoid such mistakes in the future.
Investing in these strategies is well worth it if you are at all like I once was. Developing your ability to look past line editing will help you gain a more nuanced view of the papers that you edit. You will begin to see grammatically spotty papers for the valuable perspectives that they offer, not just as a flurry of red marks to be made on the page. Conversely, papers that are stylistically polished but devoid of real substance will no longer get away with it. So, if you see in yourself the tendencies I have described, do yourself a favor: take action to change the way you look at writing now, before you become too set in your ways. Learn to see the forest, not just the trees.
Contributed by: Nic Nemec, Writing Center intern
The Writing Corner 
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