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.