By Tisha Turk, Grinnell College

The problem of attention

In recent years, attention has come in for a lot of, well, attention. Scholars, journalists, and cultural critics have written about how corporations capture and monetize the finite resource of our attention and, sometimes, how we can regain control of it (Wu; Odell; Hari; Hayes). Those of us working in institutions of higher ed have probably observed the effects of attention capture not only on ourselves but on our students.

My observations about attention are not, I promise, going to take the form of a rant about Kids These Days And Their Phones. In fact, my point is in some ways the opposite: for many if not most of us, attending to writing has always been hard. Students’ lives were full of distractions long before we all started carrying around shiny little distraction machines in our pockets. “The most common difficulty for student writers,” Jeff Brooks argued back in 1991, “is paying attention to their writing” (2).

Brooks’ claim might be a little overstated; students are different from each other, and plenty of them have other pressing difficulties with writing. But I know that many students, including very successful students, do in fact struggle to devote their full attention to their writing, and I see their surprise and relief when they manage to maintain that attention. I saw it last month in my tutor education class when, to launch them into drafting their research projects, we did a series of timed writing sprints, responding to a variety of prompts, for a total of 25 minutes. At the end of it, several of them expressed shock (and delight!) at how many words they’d written. 

Writing is itself an attention technology: doing it can help us sustain our attention to an argument or a sequence of ideas. But writing also requires attention. Our attention is a finite resource, and it can be hard to muster when there are more competing demands on it than ever.

That’s where writing centers come in.

From attention to attending

For years, I’ve told the peer tutors I train that one of the most important things writing consultants can do is give writers the gift of time and space to attend to their own writing and to learn what it feels like to attend to their own writing. I hope, of course, that consultants also ask thoughtful questions and offer encouraging feedback and useful advice. But those acts, too, both require and model attending—not only to the task at hand but to the writer. By fostering the conditions for attending, we create space for writers to notice patterns and develop ideas and formulate plans for next steps. Attending is the foundation of what we do.

At this point you’ve probably noticed that I am deliberately, and perhaps even a little awkwardly, avoiding the verb phrase we most often use in this context, which is to pay attention. Language matters, right? We already know that attention can be a commodity, a currency, something to be paid or purchased or stolen. Attending, like writing, is a verb, a process: “to direct the ears, mind, energies, to anything” (OED, I), and also “to direct one’s care to, to take care or charge of, look after, tend” (OED, II.5)—to tend, as one tends a garden. To attend to our writing is to affirm that it is worth tending. As Brooks says, “We ought to encourage students to treat their own writings as texts that deserve the same kind of close attention we usually reserve for literary texts” (2).

Attending—like writing, like gardening—can be learned and practiced. Like writing and gardening, it requires not just theoretical knowledge (“I should focus”) but procedural knowledge, knowing how. Muriel Harris explains this kind of knowledge by observing that 

students may think they know how to brainstorm an idea or argument, but only when sitting with a student can a tutor help the student see how it feels to turn off that internal editor, which rejects avenues of thought before they are fully explored, or how to take brainstorming notes before an idea evaporates from memory or how to let threads of an argument or analogy continue to play themselves out in various directions. (33)

Similarly, my friend and colleague Scott Whiddon describes writing consultants as “personal trainers for writers”; a personal trainer not only tells us what to do but also guides our movements so that we can learn how it feels to do an exercise with the correct form. What does it feel like to attend to our own writing? Writing centers are one place to find out.

Attending to process and self

Learning how to attend to our writing is part of developing a functional, sustainable writing process. When we don’t know how it feels to attend to our writing, we don’t know how it feels to stop. I meet with a lot of students who feel perpetually overworked in part because they’re not making much progress on their writing when they’re “working” and are thus unable to enjoy a respite from writing when they’re not working—or, worse, they deny themselves respite because they “still have so much to do.” They’re forever busy and yet somehow not getting very much done.

Attending to writing means attending not only to specific writing tasks but also to ourselves as writers: our own needs, our own processes. Here again, writing centers can help. One of the best things about working with regular visitors is having the time and building the trust required to encourage that ongoing introspection. What processes, procedures, and planning techniques actually work for them? What have they been told that they ”should” do that they can let go of? What helps them direct their attention effectively? What distracts them, and how can they mitigate those distractions?

Attending to neurodiversity

Speaking of distractions: At this point I should probably mention that I’m writing this post as someone with ADHD. Despite the “attention-deficit” part of the name, ADHD isn’t always characterized by a deficit of attention. Personally, I would not have made it through grad school without the ability to hyperfocus; I am great devoting my attention to things, especially if those things are fictional narratives or new songs by bands I love. What I’m not great at is regulating my attention. Writing tutoring has been one of the ways I’ve strengthened my ability to focus: helping others practice attending to their writing has helped me do it myself. But because my internal attention regulator is fundamentally unreliable, I rely instead on external regulators, including lists, timers, routines, and sensory cues.

For writers with ADHD, writing center sessions can function as a kind of body doubling: tutors model the work of attending and gently call back the writer’s attention when it wanders. Some of my frequent flyers with ADHD intentionally use writing center sessions for this purpose: they come to work near someone quiet and sympathetic and to ask questions as they arise—and if this helps a writer move from endlessly ruminating about writing (or feeling guilty about not writing) to actually writing, I’m all for it. More commonly, tutors can encourage the writer to break down their end-of-session plans for next steps into smaller and more manageable tasks (as many college writers, with or without ADHD, need to learn to do).

Disclosing ADHD in my bio on our writing center schedule means I end up working with quite a few writers who are open about their own neurodivergence and eager to figure out writing strategies that work with rather than against their ways of processing. Autistic writers may not need to practice attending so much as they need guidance about what to attend to, especially when it comes to figuring out the mystery of audience expectations or which information or sequencing will help readers follow their arguments. Dyslexic writers may need writing consultants to lift some of the attentional burden produced by text. When consultants rather than writers read drafts aloud, dyslexic writers are free to attend to higher-order concerns instead of fighting through individual words and sentences; when consultants take notes during a session, writers are free to focus on thinking. 

Telling the story of attention

My point is not that teaching students how to attend to their writing is something writing centers ought to do; my point is that we are already doing it. Being aware of this can allow us to do it more consciously and intentionally. And we can use the language of attention to talk with students and faculty about what we do. Explaining to faculty how we encourage students to attend to their writing can illuminate what happens in a writing center session and communicate that we work not only with papers but with writers as they engage in the process of writing. And engaging students in a conversation about the demands on their attention—and the impact of learning to attend—can reinforce the lessons we’re always hoping to teach about the value of process and the importance of time.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Tamara Beauboeuf for so many generative conversations about writing and gardening and for pointing out the relationship between attending and tending; to Scott Whiddon for the personal trainer comment at IWCA 2025; and to the Fall 2024 iteration of Teaching and Tutoring Writing for helping me think through these ideas. Finally, the featured image is by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash.

Works Cited

“Attend (v).” Oxford English Dictionary. September 2025. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8531548412.  

Brooks, Jeff. “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work.” Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 15, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1-4.

Hari, Johann. Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again. New York: Crown, 2022. 

Harris, Muriel. “Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors.” College English, vol. 57, no. 1., 1995, pp. 27-42.

Hayes, Chris. The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. Penguin, 2025.

Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Melville House, 2019. 

Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Vintage, 2017.