Before I began working at the Writing Center, I studied at the theatre school where I had a different sort of experience with reading, writing, and analysis. The main form of writing I looked at was in plays, and the main type of analysis was subtextual. Having spent so much time analyzing fictional writing, I was concerned I would be unprepared when it came to understanding essays, research papers, and really anything unrelated to “classic theatre”. As it turned out, I had more practice with this skill than I expected.
READ ON to learn all about it!
The biggest commonality I found between theatre and UCWbL work was the importance of SUBJECTIVITY: whether it was script analysis or written feedbacks, I was the only person who could decide what mattered most, and more importantly, why it mattered.
My junior year of high school, I took my first ever script analysis class. We studied Chekhov, Ibsen, Beckett, and others, all of whom fell on a sliding scale of objectivity. My teacher that year was especially keen on the more SUBJECTIVE, or shall I say absurd, end of the spectrum; he wanted us embrace our confusion, and instead of running from it, afraid to pin meaning on something that seemed to defy it (meaning), use that ambiguity as a bridge toward a more personal relationship with the text.
This may sound great and all now, but at the time, I don’t think I appreciated this lesson as much as when I started at the Writing Center and was faced with a similar set of circumstances: take a piece of writing that falls somewhere on the scale of objectivity, and define the piece’s meaning in a way that will reach the writer and be of use to them. Higher stakes than third year script analysis class, if you ask me. I mean, would Anton Chekhov really care what I interpreted the meaning of Sonia’s monologue in The Seagull to be? Probably not. Besides, even if the Russian Bard were able to travel through time to receive my feedback, I don’t think he would find it all that useful, anyhow. This was the real difference between script analysis and peer tutoring: my choices had consequences that could affect someone’s perception of their writing: feedback that, as a writer myself, I take very seriously.
Here are some specific ways that I found my past approach to script analysis coincided with writing written feedbacks, SUBJECTIVITY being the common denominator:
Hierarchy Of Needs
As any newly-schooled writing tutor will tell you, it is extremely important to prioritize during an appointment and not let yourself trip over every misspelled state capital or out of place verb tense. This is where Powers of Subjectivity come into play: you must decide what your agenda items should be in correlation with what will help the writer the most.
Knowing what I did about dramatic writing, the names for the tools (structure, theme, superobjective) did not matter as much as the practice of knowing when was the right time to employ one of these devices is, and when it is best to look instead for something more substantial to focus on. Theatrical writing can be as subjective as a written feedback, the only technical difference is the names for the tools: verb tense, spelling, syntax, etc. The overlap that my theatre background provided me with was the intuition needed to know how to prioritize.
Think Like The Writer
Sometimes when it is difficult to understand a choice in an essay or play, it can help to imagine that you are the writer who has made that choice, confusing as it may seem… for now. Disclaimer: I don’t shut my computer, close my eyes, and envision that I am another person every time I hit a tricky spot in the paper I’m reading, but I do hope to think about this “tricky spot” as a piece of the whole rather than its own, jutting deviation.
Courtesy of Umit Bulut, Unsplash.
This can go in tandem with reading the paper all the way through and then coming back to a place that confused me. If there seems to be a logical landing group that the writer was aiming for and just happened to fall short of due to syntactical, grammatical, or other obstruction, see the “forest for the trees”, or however that saying goes.
This was a practice I would often employ when reading an absurdist play, some of the weirdest ones including The Bald Soprano and Not I. When the whole thing seemed to be utter nonsense upon first examination, it was tempting to put it down and move onto something more linear and solid (e.g. Arsenic and Old Lace). Yet, I think there is a certain satisfaction gained by finding an entrypoint to textual riddles; and when you solve one of these riddles, you may be helping the writer tremendously, too.
In closing, I would like to meditate on a few words that seem to float in the air for new tutors: that they are at the UCWbL for a reason (forgive me for paraphrasing something more poetic). But it’s true: there must be something about your style of subjectivity that took you from interview to orientation, from observation to leading, to wherever you are now. Whether it is your fifth written feedback or eighty-fifth written feedback, you are the same person reading the paper, using your intuition to decide what is worth commenting on, and what is worth being left unsaid.