Center for Writing Excellence Blog

How to Face and Conquer Writer’s Anxiety

Hi, I’m Sofie Campbell. I’m a member of the class of 2024, double majoring in Marketing and English Literature and minoring in Professional Writing and Rhetoric. I also work as a Writing Center Consultant. There comes a time in every writer’s life when they must do the unthinkable: allow someone else to read their writing. It happens to the best of us, myself included. Sharing your writing for the very first time can be an intimidating prospect, especially when first entering college. It can sometimes be an uncomfortable experience, especially if you’re prone to writer’s anxiety.

What’s writer’s anxiety? Here’s some common scenarios:

• “I sit down but then choke.”
• “I paralyze myself by overthinking.”
• “I feel completely unprepared.”
• “I’m terrified that my ideas won’t be good enough.”

If you’ve ever experienced one of these thoughts before writing or during writing, it may have been writer’s anxiety. This can lead to writer’s block–and trust me when I say you’re not alone here. Writer’s anxiety is when a person experiences “negative, anxious feelings (about oneself as a writer, one’s writing situation, or one’s writing task) that disrupt some part of the writing process.”

What causes writer’s anxiety? Here’s a few examples provided by the UC Berkeley Writing Center:

• Fear that criticism of an essay is the same as criticism of a person’s self-wort
• Fear from past bad memories and negative experiences with academic writing
• Conflicting information on how to write
• The pressure of feeling the first draft must be perfect
• The misconception that every word must be edited as you work on a first draft
• Fear of writing an essay that is less than “perfect”

Sometimes a writer deals with their writer’s anxiety internally, so it’s important to ask ourselves questions that help us gain control of our anxiety. Asking yourself the following questions and answering them honestly is the first step to acknowledging and then dealing with writing anxiety.

• What are my expectations for myself?
• What are the professor’s expectations of me?
• How can I better balance my class schedule?
• Is my anxiety a one-time occurrence or a common situation for me?
• How do my lifestyle choices affect my academics—am I doing something too much or too little?

While it’s important to acknowledge our anxiety, there’s also some specific strategies that we can use to make writing easier when we might feel overwhelmed or anxious. Some suggestions from the University of Richmond Writing Center include:

• Break up the paper into segments based on the specific areas or arguments the paper will explore. Then, work on one piece at a time. Try an outline to help create these segments.
• Set goals, such as writing section “A” on Monday, and then take a reward. Breaks and small rewards (buying a soda, calling a friend, watching a favorite television program, etc.) keep one’s mind from getting fatigued, and they reinforce positive behavior.
• Resist the urge to edit as while writing. This interrupts any thought flow, and it often wastes time in the long run. Focus on getting out the ideas first. The writer can stop and review later.

Finally, meeting with a Writing Consultant at Elon’s Writing Center can help you manage the writing process, feel less isolated, and of course help make the paper more clear and coherent. Click here to review consultant availability.