We live in an unprecedented time. To put it any other way would probably be naive. So much about the current state of so many of our lives is entirely abnormal. Yet at the same time, "normal" is a word that I think about now more than I can ever remember in the past. So much has been said about the importance of “finding a new normal,” while so many of us simultaneously spend time reminiscing about what “normal” used to mean. For myself, and so many other students, not just here at the University of Richmond, the biggest factor in this “normal” was our school lives.

I don’t think I would be exaggerating by saying that school was my life. For 9 months out of the year, for the past 18 years of my life, my days consisted of waking up, going to school, coming home, doing school work, and repeating. It’s easy to forget how central school is in many of our lives, and how often we take for granted that many of us spend just as much if not more time with teachers than we do with our own family. Mine is the experience of so many students during this age of a global pandemic. Our “normal” is gone, and now we are tasked with moving forward as best we can.

But an important part of moving forward is finding ways to make life as much like the old “normal” as we can. With that in mind, the University of Richmond faces a daunting yet important question: how to make this inevitable period of online learning as impactful as life on campus was before this period? And if it can’t be made impactful in the same ways as it used to, how can it be adapted to best fit the new lives we are all living together? In his article, “COVID-19 versus higher ed: the downhill slide becomes an avalanche,” Bryan Alexander points out that the higher entire higher education system in America has reached a tipping point, and the current pandemic is only going to accelerate very serious problems facing universities across the country. When discussing the decision high school seniors will now face when choosing where they attend, he mentions, “One result is down-shifting which institution they attend. Instead of a research-I, a state school. Instead of a state school, a community college. Rather than a liberal arts college, a wholly online enterprise … Another result may well be holding off on going to university at all” (Alexander). The college decision is by no means a simple one, and like Alexander mentions, it's not getting any easier. With more options than ever, some entirely remote and online, both students and university administrations are scrambling to do more now than ever before. Students need to consider more information than ever before, all while weighing the possibilities of circumstances entirely out of their control. And administrations, and many of their internal programs, now more than ever need to find ways to stand out amongst the growing swell of college options to avoid being one of the many institutions facing oblivion.

This all uncertainty combines to create an atmosphere around school that students like myself have never experienced before. If an extended period of remote learning has taught us anything, it's that school is so much more than a vessel to take classes and eventually earn a degree. It's a life that we live, and have lived for as long as we can remember. My best friends in life I’ve met in school. Many of my role models have been teachers who influenced me. By not being on a physical campus, we may still be doing the technical definition of “school”, but in reality we are missing out on what so many of us would point to as the reason school is so important to us. More than the academics, the social aspect of being part of a school community, and the joys and experiences that come along with it, are now sorely missed. Perhaps that’s what makes the current situation so daunting to schools across the country. They know how important the social fabric of their institutions are, and yet they have to balance keeping that intact, with the inevitably difficult administrative decisions to which Alexander points.

For The Writing Center here at the University of Richmond in particular, many of the challenges that we are likely to face may not even be revealed to us yet. Personally, I am still learning how to adapt myself to a new way of living more than a month after I first learned that we would not be returning to campus this year. I think that it would be naive to think anyone, the collective Writing Center included, can accurately predict how this will eventually affect Richmond students. But even with that said, I think there are certain things that will help steer in the right direction, even if the destination isn’t quite clear.

First and foremost, not just students, but everyone at the University of Richmond needs to be treated with sincerity. The world has drastically changed, seemingly overnight. To figure out how to best move forward, everyone needs to understand what really is important to them, and to those they interact with. For The Writing Center, that means doing everything we can to make sure that our interactions as tutors are as genuine as possible. In “A Kind Word for Bullshit: The Problem of Academic Writing,” Phillip Eubanks and John D. Schaeffer stress the disconnected nature of what they call “Academic Bullshit” where the nature of the subjects being written about may perpetuate a relatively shallow “academic” discourse at the expense of alienating those outside the field. They go on to say, “According to Frankfurt, bullshit does not necessarily involve a misrepresentation of facts but must involve a misrepresentation of the self—one’s feelings, thoughts, or attitudes” (Eubanks and Schaeffer 375). As a writing center, we face a somewhat similar problem. Our goal is to make people better writers in general, yet many students’ goal remains improving an individual piece of writing before an individual due date.

We constantly have to work against the fact that our goals and students’ goals may not be the same. This means that to try and help writers as best we can, sometimes we may need to take an indirect path to making their overall writing better. This can result in the student believing they are learning one thing to improve their paper, when in reality we are trying to teach them something they can apply to all their future papers. As Eubanks and Schaeffer point out, we do not misrepresent facts, but there is the possibility for the misrepresentation of intention. While misrepresenting intentions in editing and tutoring can be effective in achieving both the short-term goals of the writer and the long-term goals of the tutor, it can also result in insincere interactions between student and tutor. Students may need help now more than ever. The rigors of a sudden switch to remote learning means that students are facing challenges they may have never imagined, which will only exacerbate existing challenges they may already be facing, including writing. But now also is a time where things feel less permanent than ever. While we may always strive to make better writers long-term, students need help, now, in the short-term. And for that to be done as effectively as possible, there cannot be any discrepancy between our goals and students’ goals. We have to be as honest as possible with students on what they can do to help improve all aspects of their new remote assignments. And while this may bring up the possibility of tutors simply acting as glorified proofreaders, I don’t think that needs to be the case either. As a writing center, our goals to make better writers long-term, rather than better writing short-term doesn’t have to change. We just need to place more emphasis that we ever have on how specifically students can take skills we teach them about long-term writing habits and apply them to short-term individual assignments. Again focussing on sincerity, we don’t have to change what we are trying to help students learn, we instead need to help students understand the process of The Writing Center. If we can slide back the curtain and help student writers see how long-term writing habits can and will directly impact their short-term projects, we can both avoid simply proofreading, and assure students that we are dedicated to helping them in every immediate way we can.

Simultaneously, as we strive to be as genuine as possible, I think it will be important to be more receptive than ever to students’ writing. This is not to say that we should adapt entirely new conventions when it comes to the way we approach editing and tutoring. But I do believe that this is a time when passionate students will find ways to express themselves in ways that may surprise us. Personally, for a recent paper, my FYS professor gave my class the option of writing a standard literary analysis essay, or writing a reflective essay on what it means to study and have conversations regarding literature at a time like this. I opted for the latter, and I feel like what I wrote was not just an essay, but a look into my own mind, and how I go about processing the new world we are living in. And sure, the language was not as clean and polished as it would have been for a more formal paper, but I don’t think that makes it any less valuable or valid as a piece of writing in this case. Assignments like this can be a model for how to get students to produce their best possible writing long after the return to normalcy. Perhaps, going forward, more teachers will decide to do the same, focussing more on the expression of the student rather than the typicality of the writing itself.

When given the chance to express themselves, Richmond students can produce exceptional writing, even if it may be unconventional. Yet this is not always the case for college students, and we may see a change in attitude toward what Keith Hjortshoj calls "an empty formality" (112) as we have more remote learning. The quality of such expression suffers. In Understanding Style: Practical Ways to Improve Your Writing, Joseph Glaser mentions a concept he calls “voices that you put off.” He says, “Overwriters think they are doing fine, even when the results are awful … Other bad writers just don’t listen to themselves putting readers to sleep with monotonous breath units or setting their teeth on edge with ugly, grating prose” (59). What he means by that is that there are particular voices that we can tend to use in writing that may stick out to readers as ingenuine, sloppy, or overly formal. In particular he mentions the stereotype of the “creative genius” as one where the writer can tend to use overly expressive language that can end up feeling insincere. As we start to look at a larger collection of student writing that will come out during this remote period, I think we will start to see more and more of “creative genius” styles of writing, or at least something similar. As students have more time to reflect on how their lives have been affected, I believe that they will find ways to use more creative language to express it. When we as a writing center see this, I think it will be important for us to address without limiting students ability to say what they really mean. Essentially, we need to find ways to embrace the creativity behind the “creative genius,” without steering it into cliche territory.

With all of this in mind, ultimately I think that one of the most important steps we need to take to help students best during this time might also be the most difficult. We can try all we want to be as impactful as a remote writing center as we were as a physical writing center, but there will inevitably be some pushback, or a significant period of adjustment at the very least. Above all else we need to listen to the students, and embrace their response to our new remote format, even if that response is negative. In “Protocols and Process in Online Tutoring,” George Cooper, Kara Bui, and Linda Riker discuss this exact problem with regards to online tutoring, “Whether your advice - or any advice - works can only be determined by feedback from the writers themselves, and this can be hard to come by in the online environment” (135). Whether through remote tutoring or not, the only way for us to accurately gauge the effectiveness of our practices is to listen to those we are trying to help. At this point, it is impossible to know exactly how we will best be able to help students adjust to remote learning, so by taking feedback directly from those students, we hopefully can maximize the effectiveness of our online tutoring. Richmond students are very well equipped to deal with academic rigors and challenges, in whatever form they may come. Students come to the University of Richmond because they have the skills to be able to adapt and thrive in a difficult academic environment, and they become part of a larger community that embraces that fact. But at the same time, Richmond students are not robots. It will be difficult to achieve the same levels of academic success in a remote environment. I believe that thinking otherwise would be naive, so embracing that would allow us to best help students as they try to stay as close to their own academic standards as possible.

The Writing Center, and the University of Richmond at large, will have to learn to adapt to the changing times if it wants to continue to be an effective place of learning, there’s no way around it. For students and administration alike, we are redefining what normal means to us. Students are going through what could be one of the most difficult times of their lives, and there is no telling the adverse effects that so much turmoil will have on us all. Hopefully we will be able to return in full in the fall, and hopefully we will all feel some semblance of the normality that life at Richmond used to have. But as situations change and decisions are made daily, nothing is guaranteed. Things may not go back to the way we are used to right away, if at all. This pandemic has impacted us all in so many different ways. Each student has to approach the prospect of eventually returning to campus with the idea of how this period of isolation has affected them individually in mind. For something so integral to our lives as school to be taken from us so suddenly means that it is safe to say the Richmond we return to will not be the same one we left, and the students returning will not be the same ones that left either. But I suppose the silver lining there is that a return, whatever it may look like, is still a return. New challenges regarding remote learning and student readjustment are inevitable, but as students we will do our best to take in stride all the new challenges we will face, and it is now the job of the university and institutions like The Writing Center to do the same.

Works Cited:

Alexander, Bryan. “COVID-19 versus Higher Ed: the Downhill Slide Becomes an Avalanche.” Blog Post. Bryan Alexander, 31 Mar. 2020.

Cooper, G., Bui, K., Riker, L. “Protocols and Process in Online Learning.” A Tutor’s Guide to Helping Writers One to One, ed. Rafoth, B., 129-139.

Eubanks, P and Schaeffer, J. "A Kind Word for Bullshit: The Problem of Academic Writing." College Composition and Communication 59.3 (Feb. 2008): 372-388.

Glaser, Joseph. Understanding Style: Practical Ways to Improve Your Writing. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Hjortshoj, K. The Transition to College Writing. 2nd Ed. Boston: Bedford / St. Martins, 2009.