When the College Writing Programs launched Berkeley Writers at Work, a series of once-a-semester interviews with well-known writers on campus, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost
Carol Christ was on hand to both make the introductions and underscore the topic’s importance.
What practice, she asked, does every scholar share, regardless of field?
“We’re all writers,” Christ told the crowd of students, faculty, and staff gathered in the Library’s elegant Morrison Room. “Writing is the way we convey the results of our research.”
The connection sounds so straightforward, but the centrality of writing to academic life is not always acknowledged. Would-be scholars often think of themselves as researchers first. They learn the hard way that to participate in the academic conversation, they have to communicate their research. They have to write. And suddenly writing, far from being simple, seems a mysterious and daunting process.
When it comes to that other practice academics share in common, teaching, graduate students at least have a chance to learn by observing, to model themselves after their best professors. They benefit even more when their professors serve as mentors, actively pushing them to become better teachers.
But such relationships, as graduate students know, vary from department to department and even from professor to professor. The same goes for help with writing. And unlike teaching, writing is typically done in solitude. Rather than watch a professor labor over a first draft, graduate students more likely see only the finished book or journal article and wonder how their disorganized scribbles will ever be so polished and perfect. No wonder writing remains mysterious—and daunting.
Ron Takaki, a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and subject of the first Berkeley Writers at Work interview, calls the lack of support for graduate writing an unrecognized problem on campus.
“Our graduate students haven’t been trained to write dissertations,” Takaki says. “Maybe that’s one reason why they take so long. And why some of them never finish.”
College Writing Programs Director Glynda Hull fields frequent requests from graduate students looking for courses or assistance to improve their writing, even though her program offers only undergraduate courses.
“Writing is so important to academic life,” says Hull, who is also an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education. “Yet the conventions that develop around writing—the special ways of marshaling evidence, of organizing pieces, of referring to your work and to yourself as a researcher—these are not talked about much and are fairly invisible. It’s knowledge of these conventions that students need and want.”
Departmental Help
If writing is so basic to academic life, how do graduate students across disciplines—in ethnic studies and integrative biology, English and mechanical engineering—learn to be not just good scholars but good writers, good communicators of their research?
Hull believes the best source for help with writing is—or should be—individual departments. What graduate students want most, she says, is help developing an academic voice within their own fields.
“There are certain things I could help a sociologist with,” she says. “But there are certain things that I wouldn’t be able to help with. Often writing questions are intertwined with thinking questions.”
Fortunately for sociology students, a writing seminar previously offered once every two or three years became a part of the regular curriculum this fall. The workshop-style course focuses on rewriting papers students already have written. Students edit each other’s work and revise their own, with the goal of reworking a paper until it’s in publishable form. Sociology also offers a year-long seminar that functions as a support group for students working on their dissertations.
Not every department does so much.
“Some faculty are more aware than others of the problems students encounter,” says Hull. “But across the board, faculty aren’t well-informed on how to help students with writing.”
One way to address this problem would be to provide workshops to help faculty work with graduate student writing, especially on works in progress rather than finished papers. For the time being, Hull says, “Faculty are probably relying on the sorts of feedback they got—or didn’t get—when they were graduate students.”
Professors also aren’t widely aware of how to structure papers in a course to help students manage their time. For example, instead of telling students they have a paper due the end of the semester, a professor can set a series of deadlines, requiring, by the third week of classes, a list of three or four ideas for a paper; by the sixth week, a preliminary bibliography; by the seventh week, either a draft or the introduction. Such strategies, while simple, help students avoid procrastination.
Finally, professors could talk more to their students about their own writing process. “I bring in early drafts,” says Hull. “I talk about how I got the idea to do this particular piece. I may even have students look at individual paragraphs and tell them what I was trying to accomplish.”
All professors, Hull points out, could, in effect, produce their own Berkeley Writers at Work series in their classrooms.
“So much of this boils down to making the writing process visible to people and demystifying it,” she says. “It’s such an invisible thing, and such a daunting thing. Anything that instructors can do to open up that process, make it more visible, show the false starts and even give students a sense of the time involved—all those things are helpful.”
The Writer as Teacher
Hull could well be describing what Takaki does in his graduate seminars. An obvious choice for the first Berkeley Writers at Work interview, the ethnic studies professor is a talented and prolific writer whose nine published books include A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America and Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb. He is also an exemplary teacher of writing who actively guides his graduate students’ work.
In his seminars, Takaki assigns students to work with a writing partner. Students critique first outlines, then drafts. The critiques focus on what Takaki calls the three C’s: clarity, to make sure the ideas are presented clearly; coherence, to make sure the ideas connect to one another; and content, the ideas themselves.
Takaki’s pairings are based on a partnership he developed during graduate school. While doing research in the archives of Duke University, Takaki, then a graduate student in history at Berkeley, met Larry Friedman, a graduate student from the University of California, Los Angeles. Takaki was about to begin his dissertation on slavery, Friedman, on race in the post-Civil War South. The two shared dinner and agreed to exchange manuscripts. Thirty-three years and 14 books later, they’re still writing partners.
Takaki tells his students, “When I pair you up, who knows? You may be writing partners for life.”
For his dissertation students, who number four at a time, Takaki forms a writing support group. All four students look at each other’s drafts, then meet, along with Takaki, to go over them for clarity, coherence, and content.
“It provides a community,” says Takaki. “Students find that writing a dissertation is not isolating, it’s not depressing. They’re supporting one another, inspiring one another, energizing one another.”
The sense of community is further established by holding the writing group at Takaki’s house and commencing the two-hour sessions with dinner.
Takaki also invites his seminar students to his house for a workshop. He likes to give them a firsthand look at the mysterious process called writing.
“Many students just see our books. They don’t know what happens when we actually create these books,” he says. “For them to see my two desks, and how I lay out materials, and my filing system—it’s not an abstraction for them.”
Takaki’s wife plays a central role in his writing as a first reader and editor of all his works. When students visit the house, Carol Takaki explains their editing relationship, and Ron Takaki displays successive drafts with his wife’s handwritten comments.
“Students will practice editing with their writing partners,” says Takaki. “One of these students told me just a week ago that when she critiqued another student’s writing, she thought that she became a better writer herself.”
The Scientist as Writer
The interaction between Takaki and his students and between his students and their writing partners is in some ways similar to what graduate students experience in the sciences, where writing is a less solitary undertaking.
Take David Walther, who received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in May. Walther’s approach to writing his thesis differed from that of many students in the humanities or social sciences. He wrote much of his thesis in the lab where his research took place rather than sequestered at home or in the library. He was as likely to spend his time making up graphs as typing words.
Rather than years, he spent about four months writing his paper—or putting it into thesis format, anyway. Much of the writing had already been presented at conferences as works-in-progress, then as papers to refereed publications. Each step in this cycle not only provided useful feedback but served as a deadline that prevented procrastination. Walther’s final task was to assemble these relatively large sections and make them flow smoothly.
Don’t underestimate the difficulty of that task. Achieving continuity is one of the biggest challenges faced by graduate students in the physical and applied sciences, according to professors in those departments. Another is that students write papers no one but another expert in their field can understand.
So in spite of the collegiality of the writing process, science has a reputation for being hard to read. Is it because scientific concepts are just too complex to put into words? Or is it, as some professors suspect, because scientists seldom receive formal training in writing beyond their undergraduate years?
According to science writing consultant Judith Swan, the problem is lack of training in writing. Swan, who holds a Ph.D. in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaches writing to graduate students in chemistry, molecular biology, and mechanical engineering at Princeton University. Last spring she led a workshop, sponsored by the Career Center and the Graduate Division, for Berkeley graduate students.
The first problem facing science students, Swan says, is they don’t have a language with which to talk about writing, either in terms of the process or its goals.
“The mere recognition of good and bad writing does not translate directly into helping someone to revise successfully,” she told The Graduate in an e-mail interview. “Most comments on writing are descriptive; they label the prose—‘unclear,’ ‘wordy,’ or the ubiquitous ‘awkward’—and even when accurate, they tell the writer precious little about how to do better.”
Even more futile, says Swan, are instances when professors rewrite sentences—or whole papers, if the professor is collaborating with the student—which only leaves the student feeling inadequate or insulted.
(Scientists, by the way, are not alone in the unhelpful comment department. Hull points out that students all too frequently get papers back from professors marked with nothing but a grade. Yet one of the tried and true ways of working with students on writing is to give papers a close reading and provide feedback. Comments should not just point out problems, Hull says, but should single our ideas that are interesting and might merit further development.)
Swan argues that readers bring certain expectations to a piece of prose that if not met hinder comprehension. If the goal of writing is to communicate your ideas, the writing process must involve stringing words together in a way that meets readers’ expectations.
Readers’ Expectations
Take, for example, the problem of continuity, or its lack. Swan says that most writers, in composing a sentence or a paragraph, jot down new information first, then take their time putting that information into context. The order has a simple explanation: Writers want to record the new information or idea before they forget it. But readers have opposite expectations: They want to know the context first, before they consider something new. So when constructing a sentence, a paragraph, or any unit of composition, Swan advises putting the old information, or context, first, in what she calls the topic position, and the new information next, in what she calls the stress position.
By having a common language for describing the goal and the structure of prose, says Swan, you can avoid abstract arguments over which version sounds better and instead concentrate on which best expresses what you want to communicate. If two scientists understand what kind of information should go in, say, the stress position and still disagree on what that information should be, then the problem may not be in the writing but in the science. Writing, once again, facilitates thinking.
“The end result,” Swan says, “is not only better writing, but better science.”
Paying attention to readers’ expectations also addresses the second problem, which is writing as if your reader knows as much as you do. To counteract this problem, try reading your paper while pretending you don’t know anything about the subject, or ask a colleague or a friend to read your paper. Being forced to imagine an audience, says Swan, gives you perspective on your research.
“Students in particular tend to underestimate how much they have invested in understanding their work,” she says. “After all, everyone in the laboratory seems to know more than the student, making it hard for students to realize how much they know compared to everyone outside.”
Walther found himself explaining his research to his family and his wife’s family. Since his thesis was on opposed-flow smoldering combustion of polyurethane foam, he had a lot of explaining to do. Answering his family’s questions—meeting their expectations—formed the basis of his introduction.
“The feedback,” he says, “has been the biggest help.”
Writing Groups
What can you do if your department doesn’t provide writing workshops, your professor doesn’t offer adequate feedback, or your family doesn’t want to hear one more word about your project? Or even if they do, what more can you do to improve your writing? One suggestion that comes up frequently is joining or forming a writing group, with or without faculty support.
“You can make a lot of progress by meeting regularly, having deadlines, asking a group to comment on your writing in specific ways,” says Hull.
Keep in mind that such a group needs agreed-upon guidelines. For a writing group to be effective, its members need to be given some structure and some general rules on commenting.
First drafts, for example, are not the place for delving into grammar, style, or sentence structure but for commenting on shape, substance, and organization of ideas. It helps if the writer of the paper brings specific questions: Am I getting my idea across? Can the reader follow my point? Do I provide enough evidence? Does this seem persuasive?
The group must agree to meet regularly and to adhere to deadlines if overcoming procrastination is a goal. If you’re supposed to read or distribute copies of your draft on Tuesday, don’t put it off until the following Tuesday. Similarly, you must commit yourself to reading the drafts of others in your group and preparing feedback for the assigned meeting.
Is there an ideal size for a writing group? Five is Hull’s preference, though she’d go as high as seven. Any bigger than that, and you won’t get around to everyone. Also, the people in the group need to make a commitment to each other’s work, and that commitment is less serious when a group gets too big. You’ll be tempted to forgo reading and commenting on a manuscript if you assume there are plenty of others to pick up the slack.
Finally, it’s important that groups not just become sessions for complaining about writing, though short complaint sessions are probably okay. “They need to be text-centered,” says Hull. “You need to be looking at people’s writing and giving feedback.”
Even if you don’t form or join a writing group, make sure someone else reads what you write. Says Hull, “It would never occur to me to publish a paper unless I’d gotten feedback on my writing.”
Support Groups
While the importance of getting feedback can’t be overemphasized, groups can serve other functions as well. Rhacel Parreñas, who received her Ph.D. in ethnic studies in May, put together a group composed of four women, two from ethnic studies and two from sociology. Over a 17-month period, the group pushed Parreñas and another member to finish their dissertations— without ever reading each other’s work.
The group came together after Parreñas and another member-to-be attended a Graduate Division workshop on writing a dissertation. Parreñas came away from the workshop impressed by leader Dorothy Duff Brown’s admonition that graduate students need support.
Parreñas didn’t particularly want to join a text-based group that read each other’s work. She already felt pressed for time; reading someone else’s work, on top of all the reading she still had to do for her own, seemed too draining. What she wanted was a group that would push her to do her writing.
The four women meet every Thursday afternoon for two hours. They start each meeting by saying what they accomplished that week and end by telling their plans for the week to come. The simple act of committing their plans to the group makes it harder to come up with excuses for not following through—the kind of excuses that are all too easy to make to yourself.
“Writing is so isolating,” explains Parreñas. “You have no accountability whatsoever. We wanted accountability.”
In addition to relaying accomplishments of the past week and plans for the next, the women take turns being the focus of the meeting. One had stalled for six months because she was overwhelmed by the 30 interviews she needed to transcribe; the group helped her work on a step-by-step plan to get the transcriptions done. Another had at one point quit graduate school after putting two years of work into her dissertation. The group worked with her sentence-by-sentence to help overcome her insecurity about writing.
“What we’ve accomplished is pretty amazing,” says Parreñas. “When I started the group, I hadn’t written a single word. I felt like I was never going to finish.” When we talked to her for this story, an exhausted but ecstatic Parreñas had just filed a 410-page dissertation.
Would the group celebrate? Perhaps. But Parreñas is careful to note that the group is not a social club, which she believes is part of its success.
“We’ve become really good friends,” she says. “But we don’t meet outside the group. So when we meet, it’s associated with our dissertations.”
The group, by the way, continues to meet even after two of its members have finished their dissertations.
“There are two of us left who are still writing, so we’re still committed to each other,” says Parreñas. “I’m going to stay until they’re finished.”
The Joy of Writing
Almost everyone we talked to for this story believes the most valuable lesson graduate students can learn is that writing need not be associated with pain but with pleasure.
They admit that’s not always how graduate students view the process.
“I remember one line from Ron Takaki’s (Berkeley Writers at Work) interview when he said, ‘I’m most alive when I’m writing,’” Hull says. “People’s jaws dropped. They said, ‘Wow.’”
Writing, Hull says, can be a pleasurable activity. You have to understand that every writer faces difficulties, but the difficulties are surmountable, a naturally recurring part of writing, something you learn to expect and work through rather than fret over.
Then you get to experience the pleasure that comes from articulating your ideas, bringing your thoughts into focus, creating a paper or a book. You’ve put an idea into the world, and your work may influence how someone thinks about an issue or a problem.
Writing, in fact, is inextricably intertwined with the academic task, the whole reason people are at universities in the first place, says Hull. “It’s all about creating knowledge and putting knowledge out in the world and connecting it to ideas that are already there. That’s the academic enterprise. Once students see how writing is a central part of that, once they understand they can participate in it, and once they understand all the different sorts of pleasure that are part of it, they’re hooked.”
Hooked like Takaki, who tries to show students the joy he finds in writing. When he’s at the computer by himself, he says, he feels totally involved and alive. And when he works with his wife on editing, their communication is intense and engaged.
“We both feel grief when the book ends,” he says. “We go, ‘Oh, no, it’s over. We better start another one.’”
This semester’s Berkeley Writers at Work interview, sponsored by the College Writing Programs, will feature Frederick Crews, professor emeritus of the Department of English, on Tuesday, October 6, from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Toll Room of the Alumni House. The interview is free and open to the public. If you missed past interviews with Ethnic Studies Professor Ron Takaki, linguist Robin Lakoff, or anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, you can watch them on video at the Media Resources Center in the Moffitt Library. The videos are filed under College Writing Programs.
The Graduate Division-sponsored workshops, “Practical Strategies for Writing a Dissertation,” will be offered October 9 and November 2 for graduate students in the humanities and social sciences, and October 16 and November 12 for graduate students in the biological and physical sciences and the professional schools. Workshop leader Dorothy Duff Brown will also offer a new workshop this semester called “How To Get Feedback on Your Dissertation” on October 19 and 26. For more information, call 642-7330.
The University Health Services’ Dissertation Support Group, led by psychologist Carol Morrison, is open to students from all departments. Graduate students (post-qualifying exam) who want to join this semester’s group should contact Counseling and Psychological Services, 642-9494, and ask for a screening appointment. Space is limited, so apply soon.
The Graduate Student Support Service provides free consultations for students having trouble writing papers, organizing a writing and research schedule, or writing a dissertation proposal. For more information, contact Michael Hardie, 9 Dwinelle Hall (643-9433 or hardie@uclink.berkeley.edu).
UC Berkeley Extension offers courses for non-native speakers/writers of English, which may be of help to international students who are having trouble with grammar or sentence construction. Some courses are offered online. For more information, call 642-9833, or visit the UC Berkeley Extension World Wide Web site (http://www.unex.berkeley.edu:4243/).
Books and Web Sites
Science writing consultant Judith Swan gives more examples of how to structure sentences to meet readers’ expectations in a paper she cowrote, “The Science of Scientific Writing,” which is available on the World Wide Web (http://www.research.att.com/~andreas/sci.html).
In addition, professors and others we talked to for these stories recommended the following books and Web sites:
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