Writing About Us Like Us

Two weeks before my therapist unofficially diagnosed me with autism, I told my parents that I found autistic people and experiences relatable. Standing in the swirling snow in nothing more than a jacket, I gaped in disbelief at their response. “You’re not autistic,” they said. “You’re smart.” Too astounded to respond appropriately, I fled down the stairs into my basement apartment, making vague goodbyes and “see you laters” as I went. I buried my suspicions and went about my life until my therapist brought up my autistic traits independently two weeks later. A few weeks after that, while attending a routine check-up, I mentioned this unofficial diagnosis to the doctor.

While I stared off at a corner, frantically wrapping a fidget around and around my hand, the doctor told me I was too articulate to be autistic but that I might have Aspergers or be “higher functioning”—terms I’ve known for years are no longer used by the community due to their ties with Nazism. As I sat on the wax-paper-covered seat, I wondered how a doctor could know so little. How could he have allowed his knowledge to become out of date? When I worked as a guest experience specialist at Petco, I spent hours and hours researching the proper care of pets outside of work so that I could confidently speak to customers, knowing I was giving them accurate information. If I were so dedicated to the tireless pursuit of knowledge for animals (and for minimum wage), how could a doctor who holds human lives in his hands (and is paid much more) have such outdated knowledge?

When I changed jobs, my required knowledge base changed. The same energy I put into researching proper care for hermit crabs (because none of my co-workers knew how to care for them), I put into ensuring my classroom was a safe place for neurodivergent students. While reading A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, I came across a section that considered students with disabilities in regard to collaborative writing. The paragraph read,

Writers with diagnoses on the autism spectrum will face challenges with reading their peers’ social cues, which may in turn mean that the neurotypical students in the group will need to learn to accommodate miscues or misreadings. These writers may encounter particular difficulties with collaborative assignments that assume that all participants not only can read general social cues but also can feel empathy toward other writers and feel comfortable while engaging deeply with others while editing their work. (41)

I saw red (not literally, of course, but you, likely being an allistic reader, would understand that). That isn’t because I enjoy group work. (I detest it. I’ve always detested it.) It’s because of the ableist assumption that autistic students’ struggle with group work comes because they might offend their allistic (non-autistic) classmates. Perhaps it is showing too much stereotypical autism to admit that I don’t care about my allistic classmates’ feelings. They can get over having their normalistic views of conversation and social cues disrupted.

There are real complications that autistic people might actually face with collaboration of this type (or at least there are complications that I face). In my experience, breaking into groups in a single classroom means there are multiple conversations going on at once, which creates a sensory overload, making it hard to pay attention to the students in my group. The sound blurs together, and my brain jumps from one conversation to another as the person talking to me fades into the background despite my best attempts. I disassociate, hovering dully within my body as speech rages around me. Then, the person I’m in a group with stops talking, and I realize it’s my turn, and I have no idea what they said. So, I agree vaguely with them before dumping a few of my ideas about the discussion topic, having no idea how they apply to what was already said.

We teachers need to be aware of the sensory issues caused by group work rather than the allistic student’s potentially bruised feelings because their autistic feedback partner might be a bit harsh. This blatant ableism in a recent and respected text led me to two important questions. First, what does autistic writing look like? Is it inherently different from that of allistic writers? If so, how might these differences change the way we evaluate “good” writing? And second, how can freshman composition instructors create classroom environments that are accessible for autistic students?

Autistic Writing vs. Allistic Writing

What does autistic writing look like? Well, it depends on the study you consult (not all studies are created equal). The first thing I learned upon diving into research was that I am a bad writer. I was told that, as an autistic writer, I struggled with organization and that my ability lagged behind my allistic peers. Paper after paper suggested ways to interfere early on in autistic students’ lives to improve their writing capabilities. Most often, I was accused of being mindblind or lacking Theory of the Mind (ToM). This theory is derived from a 1978 study regarding chimpanzees. In this study, Premack and Woodruff defined ToM as whether “the individual imputes mental state to himself and others” (515). This theory was stolen from its rightful place in zoology and applied to autism in 1985, growing to influence much of the research and dialogue regarding autism and writing in the 1990s.

Simon Baron-Cohen was arguably the most influential writer involved in such theories, known for coining the term “mindblindness” to denote someone who lacks ToM. In his 1997 article, he defined mindblindness as being “unaware of other people’s mental existence, of the existence of thoughts, emotions, intentions, knowledge, memories” (62). He then went on to claim that such an existence was not an “idle piece of science fiction” but that autistic people “tragically suffer” from such a condition, defining autism as “a severe neurological disorder that often interferes with, among other things, the ability to develop normal human relationships” (62). I “tragically suffer” from face blindness (prosopagnosia), but I don’t lack the ability to recognize that you, dear reader, have an inner world, nor do I lack the ability to access my own inner world (my therapist often notes that I am, in fact, extremely self-aware).

Should such a theory be relevant, it would suggest that autistic writers are not aware of their audience or even their own minds. As M. Remi Yergeau, an autistic author themselves, expounded in their book Authoring Autism, ToM denies autistic people the ability to be rhetorical (11). Because of the dehumanizing effect theories such as ToM have on autistic writers, Yergeau claimed that all such “god theories” are “decidedly inhumane” (19). Still, allistic researchers and writers have poured much energy over the years into proving that I and those like me are mindblind, that we cannot write, that we are not human.

Since the 1990s, our understanding of autistic writing has improved, but it is still negatively influenced by inherently flawed studies. In other words, to quote Yergeau, “At a time when we know more about autism than we’ve ever known, what we know is very little, and what we know is decidedly nonaustistic” (11). Before we can hope to understand autistic writing, we must first understand our inherited biases that come from years of ableist approaches to autism research.

A vital example of the state of early autism research is found in R. C. Pennington’s review of said literature. In this review, Pennington examined 411 studies regarding autistic student writing and found that not a single study met the requirements of a good study. By and large, this was because the sample pool was small, most often with a whopping sample size of one autistic student. This student’s writing, picked for the study because they were struggling with the task, was then compared to allistic students who weren’t, without factoring for other disabilities, IQ, or other neurodivergence. Similar problems were found in a more recent study of autistic writing. Zajic and Brown found that many autistic writing studies feature a selection bias of an average of 85% toward individuals assigned male at birth (AMAB). They noted that this would lead to biased results because students assigned female at birth (AFAB) generally have better social cognitive skills than their AMAB counterparts. Like Pennington, Zajic and Brown also found that autistic individuals with less substantial support needs are less likely to be studied or diagnosed. “Autistic people who already struggle with writing are studied,” they claimed. “Not those who are good at it” (138).

Part of this failure is that most studies don’t account for autistic writers having other disabilities. Studies that found that autistic writers lacked ToM didn’t account for learning disabilities alongside autism (Zajic 143). Similarly, theme development and organization, commonly thought to be something with which autistic writers struggle, are actually affected by ADHD, which has a high co-occurrence with autism (141). Furthermore, over 79% of published studies failed to consider “how writing theory informed either the study design or the interpretation of the results” (131). When studies account for these biases, such as the study done by Tomlinson and Newman, they tell a very different story. Contrary to popular belief, “many autistics are good writers who like to write.”

Diving into more recent studies was a balm to my mind, a mind I was very aware of as I researched, comparing my experiences with my findings and trying to balance the knowledge that my experience as an autistic writer should not be expected to align perfectly with the totality of the autistic community. After over four hundred studies found that I could not write, more recent studies confirmed that I could. Gillespie-Lynch et al.’s recent study surveyed twenty-five autistic and twenty-five allistic university students to better understand how autism affected writing and writing processes. While this study compensated for the possibility of other neurodivergences, such as ADHD, it still maintained a startling gender gap of 90% AMAB participants.

Before beginning this 2020 study, Gillespie-Lynch and the allistic half of their research team hypothesized that “autistic university students would exhibit difficulties with ToM which would be associated with writing challenges.” (Some gifts just keep on giving.) Contrary to their expectations, they determined that “autistic university students may often have enhanced cognitive and writing skills.” Compared to their allistic counterparts, autistic students showed “very strong evidence for heightened nonverbal IQ, beliefs in writing conventions, grammatical strengths, and overall writing quality.” A similar study by Caldwell-Harris and Posner, which compared sixty autistic and allistic blogs for writing quality, found that autistic writers “wrote in a more complex style than did typically developed peers” (1). Despite the initial ableist assumptions that many hold, autistic writers excel. These studies encourage instructors to abandon a deficit-based approach when approaching autistic writing because evidence shows that, as far as overall writing quality, autistic writers often exceed their allistic classmates.

Sound familiar? Again and again, as we come to acknowledge new voices in our classrooms, we run into the same patterns. My fellow teachers and researchers, we’ve been through this before. We’ve talked about this with multicultural students, with English language learning students, and with students with other disabilities. No author’s writing survives a deficit-based approach, not even allistic writers. This is modeled by Zefram (Andrew Main), an autistic blogger, who turned the tables in their parody, Allism: An Introduction to a Little-Known Condition. In this article, they “juxtapose allistic mob mentality against autistic self-regard, allistic manipulation against autistic accuracy, allistic generalization against autistic complexity, and allistic verbosity against autistic concision and multimodality” (Yergeau 170). If 98% of the world were autistic, this paper might argue that there is space for allistic writing in “normal” writing spaces, that there is strength in the allistic reliance on shared emotions and experiences and on their tendency to summarize, be inexact, and cling to beliefs despite evidence because that’s “how they feel.” Over and over again, we make the call to abandon deficit-based approaches, and yet, each time we acknowledge another experience, another minority, we’re confronted with the same problems. So, it should come as no surprise that I’m advocating for us to focus on the strengths that autistic approaches to writing bring to our classrooms and views of rhetoric rather than fretting about accommodation letters and ToM.

One example of shifting from a deficit approach to a strengths approach is modeled by Newman and Tomlinson. After interviewing autistic university students about their writing processes, they suggested that the writing differences Baron-Cohen labeled as mindblindness could actually be a reflection of different value systems in writing. While business and academia value succinctness, they suggested that autistic people value a thorough, detail-oriented approach (104–105). According to this theory, it isn’t that I and other autistic people lack the ability to perceive minds; rather, we have different value systems that determine what is or is not “good” writing. Think back to my story comparing the uninformed allistic doctor to a carefully informed autistic Petco worker. Neither of us was inherently wrong; our differing value systems changed the way we spent our time and what we saw as important.

This theory is also upheld by Gillespie-Lynch et al.’s research. In addition to finding that autistic writers were better than their allistic peers in terms of “overall writing quality,” they also found that autistic writing was more likely to be coded as creative (i.e., it differs from typical allistic writing) and less likely to be coded as emotionally impactful (at least to their allistic peers). Autistic writing appeals to autistic audiences because they have shared community values, whereas allistic writing appeals to allistic audiences for similar reasons. The rhetorical values academia has traditionally upheld as sacrosanct to “good” writing are not inherently more valuable than others. Acknowledging that “good” or effective writing might be defined differently by different audiences is vital to finding the rhetorical strengths that autistic writers bring to writing classrooms.

At this point, you may be wondering (at least other graduate student instructors who read this manuscript did) how to tell if your students are autistic. After a year of teaching alongside me, these graduate student instructors were surprised to find they’d really only known a mask. They told me that this writing didn’t feel autistic, even as they brought up concerns about sarcasm and emotion and even as they praised my sources and thoroughness. They asked for concrete examples of autistic writing so they could identify such writing habits in their students. Let me be clear: it is not on you to diagnose your students. Accepting different values and giving students the right to their own voices does NOT suddenly apply when someone has an accommodation letter. Embracing autistic rhetoric means that we must fundamentally re-evaluate traditional academic values and redefine “good” writing now. All students have a right to their voice, to their communities, and to their rhetoric, no matter their neurotype, their skin color, or the order in which they learned their languages.

Admittedly, even as I declare that we should accept different definitions of effective writing, part of me wonders about helping autistic writers better write to allistic values, not because autistic values are lesser or wrong, but because they will be expected to write to an allistic audience in their professional and academic lives. It is the same subtle question that comes when discussing the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s (CCCC) declaration that students have a right in their own language (like deficit-thinking, this is a path in pedagogy that must be continually re-trod). I agree with the CCCC inherently and passionately, yet I wonder about the greater world that the CCCC’s declaration cannot control. A world that is inherently, unyieldingly, overwhelmingly allistic. A world that will read this article, count the pronouns I use, and declare that it lacks something, that I was not aware of the rhetorical situation, that I could not imagine my audience, that I did not know their mind or my own.

To this niggling doubt, I say, if writing and speaking are forms of self-expression, how can they be successful if autistic writers must write like they are someone else? Within composition studies, it’s accepted that forced code-switching for those who don’t speak “standard” American English is harmful. There is no reason one shouldn’t logically extend those claims to autistic authors, except that we, as teachers and researchers, fail to transfer knowledge from one situation to another despite our attempts to teach such skills to our students. I turn to words from my fellow autistics, such as Cynthia Kim, to confirm this reality for code-switching autistic writers. She wrote, “[Passing as allistic] robs us of who we are and cloaks us in disguises that are ill-fitting and unflattering, leaving us stranded halfway between a fiction ideal of normal and the truth of our real selves” (qtd in Yergeru 154).

For this article, I’ve attempted to allow myself to write more naturally, to sidestep the rules I tell my students don’t exist, which I’ve embraced nonetheless because they were taught to me—rules like never using “I.” It takes practice to rip off the mask that I’ve crafted around myself, and I acknowledge the way the voice in this article code-switches. Forced code-switching in writing is often harmful, whether it be from one dialect to another or forcing a neurodiverse brain to write like a neurotypical one. I am still learning how to remove my own mask and find my voice, buried under years of writing like someone else.

Resolving that code-switching is not the answer only negates a suggestion—it doesn’t offer one. So let me offer a tentative solution, one I admit is idealistic, one that I hope we can achieve. This belief that autistic students should write like allistic students comes from an earnest desire for students to be able to self-advocate in the future, be that in work, daily life, or the political sphere. It is based on the assumption that the autistic student will be alone in a hostile allistic world after graduation and must learn to chameleon themselves away to survive. But Kamperman, a diversity studies researcher, has called for us to acknowledge that the duty of advocacy should not fall upon marginalized individuals. Advocacy is the responsibility of the entire community. Allistic writers should advocate for autistic writers with their words, while autistic writers advocate for themselves with theirs. The academic community must advocate for our diverse writers in the classroom. We must tell them they have a right to their language, and different writing is not bad writing—the students we teach will be the politicians, the hiring managers, and the world in the future. And if they believe different writing is not bad writing, then there will no longer be outside forces that drive diverse languages into hiding. These changes would be gradual, but they could come one day if we work together.

Creating Accessible Classrooms: Crip Time

The most common approach to addressing disability in the classroom is accommodations from the university’s accessibility office. This is not enough. Accessibility offices require official diagnoses, which are not available to many autistic students. Researchers such as Robert McCrossin have stated that 80% of AFAB autistic people fail to be diagnosed by the age of eighteen. Furthermore, Black and brown autistic children are often misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all (Yergeau 157). Even those who have access might choose not to be diagnosed. Besides the exorbitant cost, many countries such as the U.K., New Zealand, and Australia refuse autistic immigrants, and some states in the U.S. refuse certain life-saving medical treatments for autistic patients (Missouri Attorney General’s Office). Because of inherent problems with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), biased diagnoses for those who are not white AMAB individuals, and ableist laws, autistic culture leans toward counter-diagnosis, which “promotes a crip-queer ethos” (Yergeau 163). While accessibility offices require an official diagnosis before they require teachers to accommodate, autistic culture views self-diagnosis as a form of self-advocacy and accepts those who do so into their community (167). This contrast between autistic and university approaches to disability calls for professors to be more proactive in making classrooms accessible for autistic students, whether or not they are officially diagnosed or know they are autistic (I didn’t realize I was autistic for the first quarter century of my existence).

Once we acknowledge that we cannot rely on accommodation letters to make the classroom accessible because they cannot be given to every student who should have one, the burden falls on us as teachers to change the structure of the class so that it is accessible to all students. One way I have found that helps increase accessibility is to implement crip time.

Crip time, or flexible time, is a suggestion from Tara Wood, who interviewed disabled students about their writing class experience. The data she found suggests that “students’ anxiety might be alleviated through cripping time, increasing flexibility, avoiding rigidity, and lowering the stakes of writing (particularly in the beginning stages of a course)” (270). This data is backed up by Newman’s study, where students suggested that instructors implement “flexible time” in their classrooms to make them more accessible (102). The use of crip time isn’t about giving students more time, a common accommodation from the inaccessibility office, “it’s about flexibility managing, negotiating, and experiencing time” (Wood 278).

For example, I attended one particular class where assignments were due at 5 p.m. I turned in very few assignments on time in that class, though I’ve never had problems being punctual in other classes. By the time I returned from school around 4 p.m., I was overstimulated from the constant stream of people and sounds. Taking a sensory break was vital to being able to continue to function. By that time, it was well past 5 p.m. Similarly, assignments due on Friday rather than Saturday are harder to get done on time because Friday is usually a day when I’ve reached my limit and am no longer capable of functioning. After a day with fewer stressors and people, I’m capable of working once again on Saturday. As an unofficially diagnosed autistic, I was unable to get an accessibility letter. Luckily, the professor was understanding and never docked me for turning things in a bit late. It isn’t that I needed more time than my peers, but that time functions differently for me while I’m overloaded. While deadlines can help some people buckle up and get stuff done, for others, deadlines, especially deadlines turned impossible by disability (autistic writers have reported that ample time breaks are vital in their writing process), create anxiety (Newman 101). “Decreasing anxiety that is connected with disability is not only a goal but is an ethical and legal responsibility” that teachers have to their students (Wood 271).

After completing this research, I decided to implement crip time into my freshman composition classroom. In the syllabus and on the first day of class, I explained that all students would have an automatic flex period of two days after the due date of each assignment, during which they could turn in papers and projects without any negative consequence. This change made no significant impact on my workload as I simply graded each assignment after the flex time had been completed. However, this simple allowance made a big difference for many of my students in this admittedly small sample size (forty students). At the end of the semester, the students responded to an anonymous survey in which they were asked whether or not they used crip time and how it impacted their work, their stress levels, and their feelings about the class.

Not a single student disliked the change, which isn’t a surprise. What was more surprising is that most students reported never using crip time during the course of the semester, despite responding that crip time lowered their stress around due dates and writing. Several students reported that just knowing that the crip time was there encouraged them to take their time on their writing and actually revise rather than just turn in a sloppy first draft. Other students said that crip time helped create a sense of personal responsibility, encouraged them to actually do the assignments even if they were late (instead of not doing them at all), and allowed them to manage their priorities/stress levels more efficiently. The next largest group reported using crip time only a few times during family emergencies, sickness, or when several large assignments in multiple classes were due on the same day.

Only two students admitted to using crip time often throughout the semester, both of whom noted procrastination as something that was a consistent problem for them. It is important to remember that procrastination is not inherently a sign of laziness and is often a result of a variety of undiagnosed and untreated neurodivergences and mental health issues (such as ADHD, autism, and depression). Oftentimes, as teachers, if a student reaches out and explains that they need more time, we are willing to give it to them. Implementing crip time allows for all students to have access to this resource regardless of how comfortable they are discussing personal issues with their instructors. Not only does this change make the classroom more accessible for neurodiverse students, but it also benefits all students by lowering stress and increasing flexibility while decreasing the number of panicked emails in instructors’ overfull inboxes.

Despite the many benefits of implementing crip time in the writing classroom, it does inhibit scaffolding assignments. Every semester, when I get into the most intensely scaffolded part of my curriculum, I have at least one student fall behind, and their grade and self-esteem suffer for it. It starts with an annotated bibliography that isn’t turned in, and then they fail to write an outline. Because they have nothing to bring to conferences, they don’t sign up or fail to show up. At least one student has admitted it was because they were “embarrassed.” When it’s time to get feedback from peers, they have no draft to share. At this point, they are getting no benefit from the assignments or class time, which is focused on editing a draft they don’t have.

None of these students has been a slacker; often, they are some of my most attentive students. But once they fall behind, be it family tragedy, mental health, or disability, they struggle to catch up, and all instruction related to the scaffolded assignments is not only relatively useless but also makes them feel worse about their writing ability, which then increases anxiety around writing. So, while scaffolded assignments are helpful to many students, for some, they represent a doom spiral they are unable to claw themselves out of. Cripping time in the classroom can prevent the creation of this doom spiral in the first place, decreasing anxiety around writing and assignments and making the classroom more accessible.

Conclusion

Thank you for joining me in the pursuit of further knowledge regarding autistic writers and the freshman writing classroom. In my research, I learned that while autistic writing and allistic writing differ, contrary to many ableist theories, autistic writing is not inferior. Rather, autistic writers are good writers who like writing and have something unique to offer allistic approaches to writing and rhetoric. Learning to proactively change the way we view “good” writing and advocating for autistic voices in our classrooms is key to creating a safer world for autistic writing.

Another thing we can do to make our classrooms more accessible to autistic people and benefit our allistic students is to implement crip time. In recognizing the strengths that different approaches to writing have and encouraging those writing in our classrooms, we allow students to succeed as themselves. As a community, we must become more welcoming to autistic rhetoric and actively advocate for different approaches to writing in the world outside of academia. We should be willing to crip, queer, and hobble our views of traditional rhetoric and writing to create space for all writers in our classrooms. As we forge ahead, let us avoid the paths we’ve habitually trodden upon in the past. Let us, for once, learn from our mistakes and avoid deficit-thinking and forced code-switching when approaching these questions and as we continue to learn about other types of writers and their writing.