Concentrating on Writing

The Feb. 17 public meeting of the Curricular Review’s Committee to Review Expository Writing (Expos) provided compelling arguments for the maintenance and improvement of the Expository Writing program at Harvard. One issue that arose at the discussion, however, was the disparate responses from freshmen and seniors about their Expos experiences. While taking the class and soon thereafter, students tend to find great value in the first-year course. By senior year, however, many doubt the applicability of what they learned at the beginning of their college writing careers. The program’s cited faults suggest deeper, more extensive problems with the teaching of writing at Harvard, namely the disjuncture between first-year instruction in Expos and the approach later adopted by the concentrations.

During the four months of Expos, most students exhibit a marked improvement in their writing, and those who write well even before Expos tend to gain confidence in their ability to write at the college level. Expos teaches students a methodology and lexicon that they can apply broadly to writing assignments. These techniques, outlined in the Harvard Writing Center’s “Strategies for Essay Writing” hand-outs, can be used to dissect essay prompts, analyze texts, develop a thesis, and construct an argument.

At the beginning of their sophomore year, however, students find themselves in concentrations that often inundate them with esoteric and confusing writing standards that are supposedly unique to that field. One English concentrator even reported at the Curricular Review meeting that he was told in some concentration courses that in order to write well he should “forget everything [he] learned in Expos.” While different disciplines differ in their stylistic expectations, good writing tends to share core elements regardless of the subject.

Tutors at the Writing Center are in concentrations ranging from folklore and mythology to chemistry and yet tutor students on papers for departments that are often quite different from their own. Seniors concentrating in history and literature whom I have tutored on their theses have been surprised to learn that I am a biology concentrator. Meanwhile, other tutors studying English help biology students with their papers for Biological Sciences 52. Even Harvard Medical School, when organizing a class on medical writing for their junior faculty, asked Senior Preceptor in Expository Writing Maxine Rodburg to design and teach the course, which, she writes, she taught “kind of like a mini-Expos course.” We all use the same skills both in our own writing and our teaching, regardless of our particular field of study.

Expos appropriately emphasizes commonalities over differences among fields. At the Writing Center, we find that Expos classes dealing with technical subjects which are new to many first-years tend to be problematic from the perspective of writing instruction. If students are having trouble understanding the subject matter, it is nearly impossible for them to concentrate on improving their writing. Instead, easily accessible, general subjects allow students to develop a variety of ideas and learn how to write about them most effectively. Such principles of good writing are then transferable across fields, within which one can increase the level of the subject and the writing’s technicality.

Admittedly, different academic fields have unique technical aspects of their writing. Writing about history poses certain challenges, such as interpreting historical documents, that do not come up in scientific writing, where results should objectively speak for themselves. Such difficulties must be addressed in writing instruction that continues throughout one’s four years of college in order to build on what was taught in previous classes. Writing instruction from one course should be applicable to the next, regardless of whether both classes are in the humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences or are in different disciplines. Furthermore, when new lessons must be taught, students should be shown how those lessons are an expansion of what one has learned and not a contrast to those earlier skills.

Those elements unique to a field need to be addressed in a constructive manner in concentration classes. Specifically, Expos, in its final weeks, and concentration classes, in their first discussions of writing, need to explain how the skills one acquired in Expos are transferable to one’s current and future writings. Teaching fellows need to be better and more consistently trained to respond to student writing—and this sort of instruction is already offered through the Harvard Writing Project, albeit only on a case-by-case, voluntary basis. Professors should be encouraged to make writing instruction—not just writing practice and criticism—an integral part of their courses. And wherever possible, the language used in Core and departmental courses’ writing instruction and that used in Expos should be consistent, although it could stand to be revised and refined in both. Such continuity and improved quality across the curriculum would allow students to develop their skills continuously from the first day of Expos through their final piece of college writing. When all faculty share responsibility for improving students’ writing, all writing instruction at Harvard becomes more valuable.

Alon Geva ’05 is a biology concentrator in Pforzheimer House. He is the head tutor at the Harvard Writing Center.