Promoting a Passion for Writing

Professors work to strengthen writing in the undergraduate curriculum

By Debra Bradley Ruder

Gazette Staff

Dudley Herschbach has been an avid reader since he was little. "My mother claimed I could read almost before I could talk," he said, "but I was severely tongue-tied until an operation when I was 4! In fact, I'd read at least three volumes of world history before first grade."

His infatuation with reading grew into a passion for writing that has lasted for decades.

Herschbach, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist and Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science, has published more than 350 research papers, essays, and book reviews. His writings treat topics ranging from the dynamics of molecular collisions to the intelligence of dolphins and the scientific amusements of Ben Franklin.

Next week, Herschbach will share some of his well-honed ideas about writing during a talk titled "Brewing and Distilling: Writing as a Chemist." He will deliver this talk, the second Gordon Gray Faculty Lecture on the Craft of Scholarly Writing, on Wednesday, March 20, at 4 p.m. in Boylston Auditorium. All members of the Harvard community are invited.

The lecture series, which features a different faculty member each term, is part of the Harvard Writing Project, a year-old effort to help faculty develop more effective ways of assigning and responding to student writing.

"I hope the series will demystify the process of writing and help promote a culture in which writing is discussed all across the College, not just in Expository Writing classes," said Nancy Sommers, Sosland Director of Expository Writing. "Students don't want 'Expos' to be an isolated academic experience, and neither does the program."

The series, which is supported by a gift from Gordon Gray Jr. '65, began last fall with a standing-room-only talk by History Professor Mark Kishlansky. Next year's speakers are expected to be professors Carol Gilligan (on writing as a psychologist) and Mary Gaylord (on writing as a literary scholar). Sommers hopes to publish the talks as a collection of essays.

"The first lecture was tremendously exciting," said Sommers. "[And] Dudley Herschbach has published so many different kinds of writing, and he has done wonderful things to encourage his students to publish. He seemed a real natural for the series."

Writing Project

The Harvard Writing Project, the outreach arm of the Expository Writing Program, grew out of a 1994 study of undergraduate writing, commissioned by President Neil L. Rudenstine. Conducted by Sommers, the study revealed that students wanted writing to be a more visible and vigorous part of their undergraduate education.

In addition to creating the lecture series, the project has begun to place writing tutors within the Houses, and it has worked with several FAS faculty members who want to integrate more writing into their Core classes and sophomore tutorials.

"Writing is arguably the single most basic academic skill," said Lawrence Buell, Dean of Undergraduate Education. "It cannot be consigned exclusively to Expository Writing courses. The wider the participation of our faculty in the work of writing instruction, the better served our students will be."

Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish literature and of comparative literature, turned to the Harvard Writing Project this year to help fine-tune her Core course on the modern Jewish experience in literature.

The Writing Project helped Wisse and her teaching fellows frame the writing assignments and organize questions so that students know what is expected of them. In addition to the two graded papers, Wisse added four ungraded writing exercises to the workload, and the TFs began to spend more time talking with students about the challenges of writing about literature.

In one exercise, students were asked to describe what is "Kafka-esque" about Kafka, and how Kafka transforms the ordinary into the distorted.

Writing, as far as Wisse is concerned, is essential for deepening one's understanding of a topic. "It is a way of clarifying and developing your own ideas about a subject. It's a very important tool to develop in every aspect of education."

As another example, the project helped history professors Mark Kishlansky and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich redesign the sophomore tutorial in history to engage students more in the process of writing history. Kishlansky, Ulrich, and their TFs met regularly with Writing Project faculty to discuss sample papers and strategies for responding to student compositions.

"They were incredibly helpful," Kishlansky said of the Writing Project faculty. "They worked us through the process of constructive response and evaluation, which is really hard."

Students initially complained about having to produce six papers, totaling about 60 pages, but by term's end, they were "ecstatic," said Kishlansky. "It was painful to do, but profitable in the end. We are persuaded that [the writing-intensive tutorial] was a valuable experience in itself, and that it will be increasingly valuable to students as they move through the history concentration."

Faculty-as-Writers

Sommers hopes the faculty lecture series will show students that writing often involves a struggle -- even for world-renowned, frequently published faculty members. (Affirmed Herschbach, "My brewing involves lots of brooding, my distilling lots of despairing!")

Sommers also hopes the talks will illustrate the differences, as well as the similarities, among various kinds of academic writing.

Science writing, for example, comes in many forms. There are journal articles, long and short, reporting original research; review papers seeking to organize a field or define key questions; proposals for research grants; textbooks or pedagogical guides; and "popular" works that entertain as well as educate. Herschbach stressed that no matter what the format, a writer must constantly focus on the intended audience and "try to strew the path with flowers rather than rocks."

Herschbach requires students in his introductory chemistry course to compose poems on major themes, such as entropy and equilibrium. Crafting a poem, he asserts, is much more like doing science than the typical homework assigned in the introductory course. "A poem calls for a very personal effort," he said, "a quest for a new perspective."

Next week, Herschbach hopes to dispel the myth that scientists don't, or don't need to, write.

"Some people think that writing is not important in science," he said. "But that, of course, is wrong. Writing is tremendously important."