Good time-stress management
begins with quick start & early success

For many struggling writers, writing stress and time management issues merge into a two-headed monster that comes between them and writing success.

Teachers tend to assume students who procrastinate or who start promptly but quickly lose interest have something wrong with them, such as laziness or a learning disability.

In my experience, the problem may be much simpler. Many students haven't been taught writing strategies that let them get started quickly. The result is a huge time-stress management monster.

Students who love to write may be willing to go through five complete rewrites before they have something they feel comfortable with; students who hate to write will give up before they finish the first draft because they have no assurance they are headed in the right direction.

One student's stressful experience

I had an adult student in a first year college writing class who exhibited the effects of poor writing time-stress management skills to an extraordinary degree.

Ron was a nontraditional, part-time student, with a good job as a computer programmer in the aerospace industry. He was very smart: people do not get to be programmers for a NASA subcontractor by being stupid. He was also hardworking and personable.

He told me my class was his third attempt to pass first year college English. The first time he took the class, he spent so long trying to find good topics to write about that flunked because he never turned in any papers.

The second time he took college writing, he did better. He got a topic soon enough to write a paper, but not soon enough that he had time to do more than finish the rough draft. That time, his paper had so many errors in it that the instructor flunked him.

He decided to make one final attempt to pass first semester college English because his daughter was going to graduate the following spring with a bachelor's degree in communications and he didn't want to be embarrassed by his own poor writing.

I taught him, and the rest of the class, two strategies the first week: how to build a thesis statement and how to build a writing skeleton™. Those two strategies were enough for him to get his thoughts on paper in a timely fashion. In five weeks, he wrote three major papers and many smaller pieces. He earned an A for the course.

I rarely have a student who can overcome 12 years of schooling in five weeks. However, most students who have struggled with writing for years show remarkable progress when taught writing strategies that incorporate time-stress management techniques.