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On Learning to Write Well
It may come as a surprise that many students who are otherwise highly qualified for Yale arrive with serious writing problems. Computers seem to be compounding the situation, which has given new urgency to the way the College deals with it.
Summer 1996
by Annie Murphy Paul
A recent graduate of Yale who now makes her living as a journalist remembers her first experiences as a high school writer: “My teachers loved everything I produced,” she says. “I couldn’t do anything wrong.” Their glowing recommendations helped boost her into Yale, but when she handed in her first college paper, she received an unexpected response. “I got a B minus!” she says, still indignant at the memory.
Her experience is not uncommon among the first-year students who arrive at Yale every fall. Although the high school prodigies and newly-minted valedictorians who fill the ranks of the freshman classes are invariably intelligent and accomplished, “that doesn’t necessarily mean they can write,” says English professor Caroline Rody.
This is hardly news. Before he became Yale’s 19th President, A. Bartlett Giamatti (then a professor of English and comparative literature) wrote in this magazine that too many Yale students “cannot handle English—cannot make a sentence or paragraph, cannot organize a paper, cannot follow through—well enough to do college work.” Since then, things may have gotten worse. Langdon Hammer, director of undergraduate studies in English, says that there has been “a real decline in writing standards” among students just entering the University.
Two decades ago, Giamatti contended that student writing skills had been bankrupted by the hedonistic, “sentimental” culture of the 1960s, a culture, he said, that preferred emotion and sensation to disciplined thought. The “purveyors of mush,” as Giamatti called Abbie Hoffman, Kahlil Gibran, and Kurt Vonnegut, might today be identified as the computer and the television set. Raised not on literature but on the flashing images and fragmented speech of electronic media, students are less familiar with written language, less accustomed to its subtle rhythms and rigorous demands. In the eyes of many faculty members, the colloquial style favored by users of e-mail and the Internet has atrophied some undergraduates' formal vocabulary and syntax. And equipped with machines that will check their spelling and grammar, then spotlessly laser-print their copy, a few students may be tempted to think their computers can actually write their papers for them.
A nobler strain of 1960s idealism may also be responsible for the shift in literacy skills of entering students. Since the presidency of Kingman Brewster, Yale has sought to attract a student body that was ethnically, geographically, and socially diverse. As Brewster’s ambitions have been realized, the wider range of educational backgrounds that undergraduates now bring to the College has created new dilemmas for teachers of writing. Their students' training is not as uniform and predictable, and in some cases is not as thorough or demanding, as that of the preparatory school graduates who once swelled Yale classrooms. Over the past 30 years, the University has also begun to recruit increasing numbers of international students (the College enrolled 259 this year) for whom writing presents the additional difficulties of expression in a foreign tongue. Even among American students, there are some who speak English as a second language.
That Yale now has a rich selection of programs to address such needs is due in large part to Giamatti, who as a professor and then as President helped to secure funding for the Yale College Committee on Expository Writing. This group, made up of both faculty and administrators, met for the first time in the spring of 1979, and subsequently rejected many of the measures that other universities have used to promote student literacy: instituting a writing requirement, creating a writing center, or appointing a full-time director of composition. Instead, the Yale committee chose a more directed approach, designing specific programs to give students one-on-one attention, to improve their basic composition skills, and to promote good writing across the curriculum. When the committee’s original grant, from the Pew Charitable Trusts, ran out in 1983, the Bass Family Fund (among other patrons) stepped in to make the initiative, since renamed the Bass Writing Program, a permanent fixture of College life.
The committee’s innovations have flourished in the 18 years since they were introduced, and are now a model for many other institutions across the land. Yale, for example, was one of the first universities to use professional writers and editors, rather than writing teachers or even college-student peers, as tutors. The Bass program has placed one of these tutors, who is available ten hours or more a week, in each of Yale’s residential colleges. Ready to help students with their writing at any stage, from brainstorming about topics to proofreading a final draft, the tutors can attend to problems that are all but impossible to address in the clamor of a lecture class.
Paula Resch, the writing tutor in Ezra Stiles, describes her role as that of a mentor or coach, “a tutor in the old sense of the word”: a teacher who works closely with individual students, helping them identify problems in their writing and find ways to solve them. Tutors may go line-by-line through students' work, or they may engage the student in a more general discussion of a paper’s strengths and weaknesses.
Before he graduated in May, Juan Alcala had been going to Resch since his first semester at Yale. Alcala says that Resch helped him to write more concisely, use shorter sentences, and avoid overstating his points. Alcala says Resch even eased him over writer’s block. “Sometimes I’d be stuck, just reading the same sentences over and over,” says Alcala. “It really helped to have her read it and give me her comments.”
Although tutors bring different kinds of experience to the job—as fiction writers, reporters, magazine journalists, experts on argument and rhetoric—they share some common principles. Writing is a process, not a product, they say: it’s a set of skills, a way of thinking about and responding to the world. A crucial part of this process is revision: reading one’s own work with what tutors call “a writer’s eye,” alert to the fine points of diction and syntax (not to mention grammar and punctuation). Once students know the rules of language, say tutors, they can use them to their own ends, developing a distinctive personal style or “voice.” Says Melissa Weissberg, the Jonathan Edwards writing tutor: “Students often ask me, 'Can I do that?' I tell them, 'It’s your paper, you can do whatever you want.' That’s a very liberating idea to them.”
Often, however, undergraduates' basic writing skills are not strong enough to permit such sophisticated experimentation. “I’m shocked at the level of preparation some of these kids are coming in with,” says Weissberg. “Students will say to me, 'I didn’t learn any grammar in school,' or 'Teachers told me not to bother with that.' I have to emphasize things they should have known since elementary school.” Such deficiencies are all the more critical in college, where papers are assigned more frequently than in high school, are longer in length, and require more sophisticated analysis. They often entail original research, which must be properly documented. And college writing assignments may ask of students things they’ve never done before: a close reading, a lab report, a literature review.
Confronted with such unfamiliar demands, many students are understandably anxious. Writing tutors say that the students they see most frequently are freshmen worried about their ability to handle college work, and upperclassmen embarking on senior essays, a year-long project that can run to 50 pages or more. These groups are usually joined by a few whose confidence has been rattled by Yale’s exacting standards. “We see students when they’re nervous—or when they haven’t been nervous enough,” says Betsy Sledge, one of the Bass program’s three senior tutors.
Undergraduates who need practice in writing at the university level may sign up for “Reading and Writing Prose,” an English class funded by the Bass Program. Paula Carlson directs the twelve sections of the course, which last fall enrolled 256 students. “This is a transitional class,” says Carlson. “It builds on the skills that students already have, getting them ready to write college papers.” Freshmen with less-than-spectacular verbal test scores are encouraged to take the class before proceeding to the study of literature. Two additional English classes form a bridge to the department’s more advanced courses: “Introductory Seminars in Writing and Literature” and “Introduction to Literary Study.”
These beginning English classes require frequent—often weekly—writing assignments, which, after they are turned in, are then substantially revised and resubmitted. Students meet often with professors to discuss their work. “The faculty who teach these classes spend a lot of time responding to student papers,” says Caroline Rody, who directs one of the introductory classes. “We think of our comments not as criticism, but as invitations to a dialogue about how the paper can be made better.” The workshop format of the classes encourages students to read and critique their fellow students' work, improving their editing skills and giving them a sense of where they stand among their peers.
One section of the beginning English courses, subtitled “Writing Across the University,” addresses what is perhaps the most daunting challenge facing the new college student: learning to write in the language of various academic disciplines, each of which may have a distinct style, a particular sense of audience, and a specialized vocabulary. “I invite professors from different departments at Yale into the class to explain what defines academic prose in their field,” says Kathleen Pfeiffer, who taught the class this year. “Then I give the students assignments that are as close as possible to the sort of papers they would write in those disciplines”—essays which may analyze a novel, a history text, a psychology study, or a painting at the Art Gallery.
Developing writing skills across the curriculum was the idea behind another of the Bass Program’s initiatives: the creation of “writing intensive” sections of lecture classes. These sections are limited to 15 students, and are taught by a teaching assistant (or “T.A.”), usually a graduate student specially trained in writing instruction. Section members have frequent writing and revising assignments, regular conferences with their teaching assistant, and sometimes write a long paper in place of an exam. Like writing tutors, the T.A.’s who teach these sections must often help students with the nuts and bolts of good writing. Lori Rotskoff taught a writing intensive section of “Women in America: The Twentieth Century,” a history class. “I had one student who wrote entirely in the passive voice,” says Rotskoff. “I showed her that by using strong, active verbs, she could immediately make her argument much more persuasive.”
At other times, writing intensive T.A.’s help educate their students in the conventions of a discipline. Dean Bechard, a graduate student in religious studies, taught a writing intensive section of “New Testament History and Literature” last spring. “Religious studies employs a method of reading and interpreting religious texts that is quite strange to students new to the field,” says Bechard. “Instead of simply looking at how others have responded to those texts, the assignments allow students to practice thinking and writing in the manner of a religious-studies scholar.”
This year, writing intensive sections were offered in nine departments, including political science, sociology, chemistry, and humanities. In addition, some departments devote a special seminar especially to the writing demands of their discipline. Robin Winks, chair of the history department, has taught “The Writing of History” for 13 years. “Discussions of writing in the abstract don’t do much good,” says Winks. “Students need to see how the challenges of being a historian are translated into issues of writing.” Those issues, he says, include how to write history that is “interesting, memorable, and factually accurate,” and how to “embed analysis in graceful, compelling narrative.”
In addition to supporting projects that focus on basic compositional skills, the Bass Writing Program also funds “Daily Themes,” a rigorous course that has become an almost legendary component of the Yale curriculum. Intended for accomplished undergraduate writers, the class, which requires a page of writing each day, five days a week, was begun in 1907 by Assistant Professor of English C.S. Baldwin, and quickly became a Yale institution. It disappeared for two years in the late 1970s, however, and was revived in 1979 by Sterling Professor of English John Hollander. He says that the unique structure of the course—daily assignments, weekly lectures, and weekly meetings with a tutor—made it worth saving. “Having to hand in something every day makes writing a habit, not a special occasion, as when a paper is due,” says Hollander.
When Hollander returned “Daily Themes” to the Yale curriculum, he changed its focus from personal expression, occasionally fictionalized, to expository writing. There is a small group of classes offered by the English department, however, to those student writers with a creative bent. These advanced English courses—in the writing of fiction, nonfiction, plays, and verse—are supplemented by workshops that are offered through the residential college seminar program. Often taught by professional writers, the college seminars give students an even wider choice of genres; in recent years, the program has presented classes on autobiography, investigative journalism, and screenplay writing. Admission to all these classes is highly competitive, and those selected are among Yale’s most skilled and serious writers.
Students themselves often complain that the University doesn’t offer enough of these “creative writing” courses. But English professors respond that the limited number of such classes, as well as Yale’s lack of a creative writing major, is a deliberate decision on the part of the department. “Our view is that after a student has taken a few writing courses, the best way to become a better writer is to read more,” says Langdon Hammer. Some aspects of writing, he suggests, may simply lie outside the purview of the classroom. John Crowley, who teaches “The Craft of Fiction,” is himself a novelist and short story writer. “Humor, passion, understanding—all the things we read books for—that has to come from the writer himself,” says Crowley. “We can teach students craft and technique, but if we could teach the rest of it, we'd have to call it a class in wisdom, not writing.”  |
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