<p>Bok Zeroes In On Writing
90-minute study gauges writing progress, offers participants $50
Bok announced yesterday a new study administered by the Institutional Research office that offers freshmen, sophomores, and juniors $50 to write a 90-minute essay and respond to a brief survey evaluating their own writing skills.</p>
<p>The essay will be compared to the students’ freshman fall writing placement exam in order to analyze their progress.</p>
<p>“I think [Bok] is asking an important question,” Sosland Director of Expository Writing Nancy Sommers, whom Bok consulted before launching the program, said. “He wants to know whether or not students progress as writers during their years at Harvard.”</p>
<p>Bok also invited seniors to participate in a separate study. For a reward of $50, seniors can take the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), developed by the Council for Aid to Education and the RAND Corporation. The 90-minute test focuses on three major areas: critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and written communication, according to its Web site. The CLA was also administered to freshmen this fall.</p>
<p>Both of these initiatives are part of Bok’s ongoing efforts to study methods to improve undergraduate education, a subject about which he has written extensively. In his 2006 book “Our Underachieving Colleges,” Bok devotes a chapter to the subject of undergraduate writing, drawing from a four-year study conducted by Sommers between 1997 and 2001. The study tracked the writing of 400 students to “gain a better understanding of the role writing plays in a college education,” according to the Expos Web site.</p>
<p>I thought I got worse after expository writing. I placed into a higher level course that focused on reading historical history texts. After hours of reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I found myself writing page long sentences full of semi-colons!</p>
<p>At least, they were no run-on sentences, were they? LOL. But I think this is a worthwhile study. How much emphasis is placed on writing at Harvard and similar schools? How much of an impact does such an emphasis have on students' writing? For my part, I think the Expos program needs to be completely overhauled. I don't think the class my S took had any effect on S's writing. Just a hurdle to be overcome. He would have been better taking an elective.</p>
<p>I don't know about all concentrations at Harvard, but D is in the History and Lit concentration. Expos wasn't all that great (NYTimes editorial writer for prof), but her second year tutorial requires about 20 pages a week graded by two professors, and a major work that goes to review outside the university. Most of the other classes have major papers as well. She had Jamaica Kincaid in one class last year. She was already a strong writer and I'm pretty sure she is getting even better based on comments coming back. Soon she'll have to start working toward the senior thesis.</p>
<p>I suspect one question that will be studied is feedback. How good is the feedback? Are shorter but more frequent papers better than a long paper at the end? Do faculty and TF monitor improvements in writing in their classes? and so forth. This probably varies hugely from prof to prof and from department to department.</p>
<p>I became a much worse writer while I was in college. When I entered, I had a very smooth, fluent style, and I was great at writing satisfying, "well-made" essays that had a discernible point and got to it efficiently. I got accused of plagiarism my freshman year because one of my teachers thought I couldn't have written a paper I gave him. (Part of it was because the paper made it look like I knew Greek, which I didn't. But I did know the Greek alphabet, the call number and stacks location of the Loeb parallel text edition of the work and several other translations, and the phone number of a prospective Classics major on whom I had a minor crush.)</p>
<p>As I became aware of how much there was to know, and began to fall in love with more complicated theory, my writing went into the toilet. I was no longer content to churn out cheaply "beautiful" essays -- I wanted rigor, sophistication, irony . . . One of the comments on my senior essay -- which I will consider having carved into my tombstone -- was "Mr. S shows an undeniable capacity for extended thought but a more limited capacity for extended writing."</p>
<p>Law school actually made my writing much better again. I had to focus on what we now call user-friendliness: writing wasn't much good if a first-time reader can't get the point without much effort. Editing a law review helped a lot. There's nothing like reading dozens of abstruse articles for learning what works and what doesn't when you're writing about difficult topics. I think the experience of editing others' work is a really valuable part of learning how to write well.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Mr. S shows an undeniable capacity for extended thought but a more limited capacity for extended writing."
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</p>
<p>ROTFL! S had to write a paper on style for his Expos class last year. I gave him a copy of Social Text that contained an article full of incomprehensible garbage (oops, po-mo jargon). On Amazon.com, I read a comment about a lit crit star that "if you take the trouble to read her work two of three times, she makes many commonsensical points." Geez. Having to read something 2-3 times to read common sense? I was brought up on Boileau's maxim: "Ce qui se concoit bien s'enonce clairement." (sorry, CC does not like accents). Of course, it's French thinkers that caused American academics to embrace po-mo jargon.</p>
<p>If a prof assigns a term paper, due at the end of the class, how can the prof help the student improve his or her writing? Lots of students never pick up their final exams and papers, much less read the comments made on them. That, I suspect, will be one of the issues to be considered.</p>
<p>As for the life skills courses, they are not for-credit courses, if I understand correctly. They are probably no more than short sessions, and definitely not mandatory.</p>
<p>Of course you are right marite that the life skills courses are short-not for credit sessions. I just find it funny that Harvard sees a need to offer something like Doing Laundry 12a.</p>
<p>The writing issue though is an important one and if the writing is limited to a final term paper, well that may be a part of the problem. In his hum/ss courses, our son like most other college students is constantly writing throughout the term. One of his favorite profs goes so far(I kid you not) to allow students to revise, edit, rewrite their final papers whenever they wish-after final grades are submitted-the next year-after they graduate. And he will change the grade if possible. He is a Harvard man btw.</p>
<p>S does have some classes that require weekly response papers, or others that require several short papers sprinkled throughout the term. But there are many courses that require longer, end-of-the-term papers. Each kind has is merits. End of the term papers allow for longer lengths, more research. Short papers allow for more immediate feedback, but do not leave enough time to do research. </p>
<p>As for Laundy, there are stories about students at all sorts of colleges never doing their laundry from the beginning to the end of the year (and some of their parents seem to be CC posters) Freshman year, I had a real shock when my neighbor asked if she could borrow my underwear since she'd run out. I told her to go and do her laundry (this was not Harvard, by the way).
Other life skill classes may be helpful as well since the overwhelming majority of Harvard students live in dorms. They get a rude shock if they have to cater for themselves during summer or after college.</p>
<p>I had one myself. The summer after my freshman year, I stayed at my brother's flat in Paris while he took his family on vacation. He thought I was going to stay with another sibling, so he turned off the gas. After he left, I realized I did not know how to turn the gas back on or to operate an oven, or to cook anything more generally. So I spent one month eating baguettes, salad and deli which I bought daily on my way home from my summer job. I got a crash course in cooking when my brother got home.</p>
<p>Actually, there's plenty I find flawed about Harvard, including the Expos program, the hit-or-miss advising, the current curricular review, and various other things. S2 was aware of these issues but decided no school is perfect anyway.</p>
<p>S1 went to a LAC that had some off-campus apartments for upperclassmen. The idea was to smooth the transition to "real life." MIT has frats which work similarly. In fact, they work better as students really do cook for themselves. S1's LAC gave the apartment-dwellers the option of being on the meal plan, so most of them used it. S certainly did not learn to cook in college.</p>
<p>To go back to the issue of writing, Bok is reacting to the widespread perception that college students still do not write well even after four years of college. So, I guess we'll find out if that holds true at Harvard, and how to fix it.</p>
<p>My DD is taking a class at Yale this semester entitled, "Daily Themes", where students have to write 300-400 words on a given theme to be turned in every day. The essays are discussed in a section with a grad student each week, and critiqued individually with a meeting with the professor every two weeks. </p>
<p>DD's writing has always been one of her strong suits, yet she says this class has helped her a great deal. It's difficult to come up with a decent piece each and every day, and as a result, some pieces don't turn out as well as she'd like, but she's seen improvement overall. She wishes she hadn't waited until the last semester before graduating to take the course.</p>
<p>Aparently, this is the one of the first courses ever offered at the college-some say its the oldest course.</p>
<p>
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Ce qui se concoit bien s'enonce clairement.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Marite, didn't Nicolas Boileau also say in L'Art poetique: "Make haste slowly, without losing courage. Use your skills to make your work twenty over. Polish without ceasing, and repolish it yet again? </p>
<p>Fwiw, there is a more contemporary version that start with the exact words of the great thinker: </p>
<p>"Hatez-vous lentement, et sans perdre courage,
vingt fois sur le metier, remettez votre ouvrage.
Polissez-le sans cesse et repolissez." </p>
<p>"Vingt fois sur le metier ou clavier, a vrai dire, est-ce sage?
Le traitement de texte est une panacee
Dont il ne faudrait pas exagerer l'usage
Avant donc que d'ecrire, apprenez a penser"</p>
<p>ASAP- I think would have had to take a pass on a course like that but then I was an engineering major. ;-) </p>
<p>And kidding aside, I suspect that most Harvard College students are quite good writers and that any measures which would result in some improvement would be a good thing. It would be interesting to know what this IR effort finds.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Daily Themes is indeed a great, famous course. It used to be taught by John Hersey. I have wished many times I had taken it (but it seemed like a LOT of work).</p></li>
<li><p>Avant donc que d'ecrire, apprenez a penser. That's perfect. One of the biggest problems I have with writing courses is that the biggest problems I see with people's writing is with the quality of thought it embodies. Certainly a very skilled writer can make a poor argument attractive, but doing that almost always requires very precise understanding of what makes the argument poor in the first place. And if someone knows very precisely what he wants/needs to say, the relative stylishness with which he says it matters comparatively little. Teaching "writing" without substantive argument usually seems unproductive.</p></li>
</ol>