Why I Must Not Use Red Pen

I feel like I should explain my blog title. Since middle school, I have frequently been the person my friends and peers have turned to for a fresh eye for their papers and written assignments. And I, being the frustrated author-editor that I am, gladly took to papers with my infamous red pen. Well, often red annotations in Microsoft Word, because people left me little time to actually look over a print copy and return it, but the idea was the same. One of my closest friends in high school even turned a novel over to me during our senior year to take my red pen to. Another e-mailed me two weeks into the first semester from another university to ask me to look over his first Philosophy 101 paper of the year. I always genuinely enjoyed this task. I guess that’s why it threw me when, the first day of English 383, we were told that we were not to use red pen.

This statement actually really resonated with me. The logic behind it was fairly obvious: red pen is unnecessarily intimidating and authoritative, and that kind of attitude oversteps the bounds of what we as writing consultants are supposed to do. But to me, it made a significant impact. It was the sign that the work as a writing consultant would be different from the work I had traditionally done with friends and peers in the past.

This idea parallels a lot of what Stephen North talks about in “The Idea of a Writing Center.” While a lot of professors, especially in the English department, had a very defined image of what the writing centers should do, focusing heavily on grammar and punctuation as I always had, the focus of the writing consultant is meant to be on organization, clarity, argumentation, and the bigger picture.

When I sat down for my first actual commentary assignment, it took a lot of effort to pull myself from the glaring grammatical mistakes in order to focus on the larger issues of the paper: repetitive reasoning, a lack of command of the source material, and organizational issues that severely weakened not just the appearance of the paper but the argument itself. When I finally managed to do that, I found myself looking at issues in the paper that would have been lost to me in past read-throughs of similar assignments. For the first time, it actually made sense.

In a lot of ways, I feel like the help I offered to my peers in high school was sufficient for what the teachers wanted from us at the time. But now, I realize that if I approached writing consultations the same way I used to, red pen ready to tear a paper apart, I’d be doing a serious disservice to the writers I was trying to help.

"When you say '8 Pages'..."

Part of our training involved reading a paper written by a previous writing consultant for the Core class (a part of Richmond academia that no longer exists) and then mercilessly sabotaged to turn a previously well-written paper into a gold mine of consulting material. One of my biggest problems with the piece was the fact that the writer talked in circles, saying the same thing over and over again. And who can really blame him when writers like John Locke have been doing the same thing for centuries? Try reading Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and you will quickly understand what I am talking about.

Repeating the same thought, slightly rephrased, throughout the course of a work can be a useful tool for emphasis. It says, “this thing that I am saying is so important that I am going to say it again to make sure you didn’t miss it the first time.” But simply rephrasing the same thought multiple times in a single paragraph or ad nauseum throughout a work surpasses the realm of clarification and emphasis and enters the world of unnecessary, tedious, and sloppy.

This whole endeavor with the Core paper got me thinking about something: word and page limits. Any time a professor assigns a paper with a page limit, the first question that follows is whether that page limit is a minimum, maximum, or suggestion. At one point in a class last semester, one of the students even asked, “When you say eight pages, do you mean to the bottom of the page or just on to the eighth page?” The professor responded that he always had an affinity for the bottom of the page, but the message the student sent was obvious: how much work do you really want from me?

Valerie Perry discussed the idea that when writing, certain papers are for “writing to learn,” others for “learning to write,” and then, often, another set is simply “writing to get it done.” The problem here is that the combination of students “writing to get it done” and professors’ strict enforcement of page limits or, even more, word limits, is that you end up engaged in a game of stretching. The result is often this constant repetition and recycling of ideas throughout a paper, because rephrasing the same thought half a dozen times takes up more space than saying it just once. And this does not even delve into the issue of font and margin play that everyone has learned at some point. (The difference between leaving Word’s “Widow/Orphan Control” option on and switching it off can be several lines of text, which add up in a 10 page term paper.)

The result, then, is often a weaker paper than it would have been if the same point had only been made once or twice. Saying that man’s goal in life is to achieve happiness and happiness is what men live for in two successive sentences ultimately weakens the argument for the purpose of hitting a word limit.

Tell Me What You Want

I feel like, throughout a good portion of my education, this plea has been my internal mantra with every professor and teacher I've ever had. I want to impress them, I want to please them, I want them to want to read my work. But I don't ever know what they want from me.

Sometimes it feels like the grade on a given paper is completely arbitrary. A professor returns an assignment with a B and a list of issues that could be fixed (if you are lucky enough to receive legible commentary). With the guidance offered by these comments in mind, you head towards the next paper and, thinking you have addressed the issues outlined from your last assignment, and find that the next project gets a lower grade than the previous.

I speak here from experience. In my previous first year seminar, it seemed like every grade was unpredictable and incomprehensible. Several students received As on one paper and then Cs on the next, and even when our final term paper was due, the class seemed thoroughly unable to anticipate how their current paper would stand up to the work they had done all semester.

In the very beginning, I suppose this kind of made sense. The professor was clear about the fact that the first assignment would be graded easier than the others to allow him to assess the skill level of the class, and so it makes sense that the next couple of papers would have lower grades. But I watched as students bounced from Bs to As to Cs on papers throughout the semester.

I think the confusion came in large part for the commentary the professor gave on each assignment. On the first paper, my professor commented that my paper lacked development and depth, and I got a B on it. In the next paper, I tried to go more in depth and instead I saw my grade drop to a B-. As a matter of fact, the best grade I got on a paper in the class (excluding the final term paper), I got on a paper that was about as simplistic and simply organized I have ever written.

It wasn’t only my work facing inconsistent commentary, either. I had a classmate who was consistently receiving Bs and As on nearly every paper throughout the semester who received a C on the final term paper.

It seemed like the commentary on one paper was very often the opposite of what the next paper would be assessed on. What it seemed to me was that the most important part of professor commentary, the ability to make the priorities and goals that the professor had for our writing clear, was lacking. It took far too long to figure out the winning formula on our own.