Expos 20: Worth the Pain

Expository Writing 20 is the class everyone loves to hate. But really, most Harvard students would admit that their relationship with Expos 20 should be labeled, “It’s Complicated.”

Even though Expos is the one class at Harvard that every student is forced to take and horror stories about type-A preceptors abound, you just might learn something. And if you already think you’re a brilliant writer, you’ll probably get the most out of Expos, which deflates your ego along with your grades but forces you to take your writing to the next level.

The first step is to pick the right class, a process that is, truthfully very hit-or-miss. You’ll be safest aiming for preceptors who reportedly give good lectures and generally care about your well-being. Talk to upperclassmen—or if you’re lucky enough to get Expos in the spring, other freshmen—about instructors who are consistent and fair with their grading and who lead sufficiently engaging discussions.

That’s not to say that you should pick a topic that you definitely loathe just because you hear the preceptor brings Dunkin’ Donuts to every session. But don’t shy away from topics you haven’t written about extensively in high school.

I was advised in my first year to pick Expos sections with this in mind, and I lucked out. I got my first choice, “American Stories.” It had a wonderful preceptor and fun classmates. Our preceptor frequently joked about the stories we read, Expos, and Harvard freshmen. I actually looked forward to conferences with her about my drafts, and our expos class had a dinner together at John Harvard’s at the end of the term.

We read contemporary American short stories and could choose, if we wished, to write only about the ones we liked. If I thought a story was dull, I could skim it and focus only on John Updike or Jhumpa Lahiri.

This isn’t to say that the class was easy. In fact, the open-ended topics seemed deceptively simple. And identifying my “motive” for writing—a central focus of Expos—was harder than I thought; sometimes the only motive I could think of for writing one of my essays was because it was assigned. What was the cosmic need to come up with a unifying theme for a collection of short stories, I wondered?

And why, after writing an essay that made perfect sense to me and that I had worked on for several days, did I get a grade far lower than those I had gotten in high school English? Since kindergarten, writing was always my forté, and I felt slighted that writing in Expos had to mean following a formula—thesis up front, motive next, argument, then counter-argument—and to wander from said equation would be tantamount to grade death.

But although my pride was initially wounded, I only realized after writing papers throughout my sophomore year that its concepts make sense. You really should always have a motive when you start writing a paper—i.e., a problem to solve or a new angle on someone else’s interpretation.

The same goes for what you learn about arguments and counter-arguments in Expos. I find that thinking of questions my readers will ask themselves as they read my work—whether a paper or a Crimson article—and addressing those questions make for a solid piece of writing. Why wouldn’t Virginia Woolf create a narrator in “To the Lighthouse” who is clearly defined? The process might seem simple, but I sometimes forgot to be a step ahead of the reader, and to bring my thoughts to fruition; Expos changed that.

So even if your preceptor never learns your name, your sections are full of awkward silences, and the classmate who is peer-editing your paper knows more about his fantasy baseball league’s statistics than how to string a sentence together, know that the basics of Expos aren’t for naught. Expos gives you a strong baseline knowledge of how to write well; hopefully your future papers will be on topics that truly interest you, and where coming up with a motive will be second nature.

—Staff writer Katherine M. Gray can be reached at kmgray@fas.harvard.edu.