To learn to think in college, write - a lot

Even for the most zealous teacher, a quarter-ton of papers spanning 65 college careers is a daunting sight. But for Nancy Sommers, the 10 file cabinets crammed with red, yellow, green, and blue folders - color-coded for freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years - are a dream that has finally come true.

As head of the expository writing program at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Sommers had always wanted to track students once they moved beyond their first college writing class.

"I saw students making progress within the semester," she says. "But I always wondered what happened to them - and to their writing - after they left my course."

Last month, Sommers began to answer that question with the conclusion of a four-year study of undergraduate writing. It was an undertaking that reaffirmed her faith in the way writing nurtures and nuances thought, provides an intellectual foothold in college, and helps students develop a more intricate sense of themselves.

To Sommers - and to many of the students - writing is the academic cornerstone of college. All Harvard freshmen take a semester of expository writing, a seminar emphasizing close reading, revision, and research, honing analytical skills and laying the groundwork for future Harvard courses.

In addition to its central academic role, Sommers says that writing provides a vital means of affirmation, helping students "write their way into a new home.

"The freshman year is a time of tremendous transition. A lot of those questions get played out in the papers students write." She suggests that, in a time of self-doubt, "writing helps students see that they are contenders, that they can do the work."

Sommers came to Harvard in 1987 as associate director of the Expository Writing Program (known as "Expos"), after teaching English at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 1993, she became director, propelling America's oldest college writing program into its third century.

Freshmen choose from dozens of Expos classes with titles like "The Culture of Consumption," "Mapping the Mind," and "Love in the Western World" - offerings designed to give them "an intellectual occasion" for writing.

Sommers seized her own occasion in 1996, when she asked the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a grant to study undergraduate writing. She received additional support from the Harvard president's office, and, in the fall of 1997, invited all freshmen to participate in a Web-based survey. Sommers hoped for a 10 percent response rate, and was astounded when one-quarter of the class - 422 students - logged on to share their Expos expectations.

For the next four years, her team of researchers - a dozen assistants, statisticians, programmers, and interviewers - focused on a subsample of 65 students, meeting with them each semester and analyzing every paper they wrote. Last June, that crop graduated from college - and left Sommers with over 500 pounds of essays, theses, poetry, and prose.

Sommers launched her study wondering what role writing plays in undergraduate education, but quickly realized that the role changes yearly, as students embark on increasingly intensive writing projects.

"Freshman writing is often characterized by generalizations and either/or thinking," Sommers says, "but by the senior year, there is a complicated, complex argument sustained throughout. Students first learn to mimic what they learn, and then they go beyond mimicry, beyond the questions of the course, to ask questions of their own."

In Sommers's experience, those questions can launch an astonishing process of self-discovery, as students pursue research of their own choosing and embark on assignments that "help to shape their passions and show them what they're interested in."

Sommers describes a surprising zeal among study participants, an emphatic awareness of the importance of writing, and a strong preference for writing-intensive classes over courses with multiple-choice exams. "I was taken aback by how excited they were about the role writing played. It was something they could point to as evidence of learning, and it gave them a sense of accomplishment."

She stresses the need for feedback from instructors in individual conferences. "There's a social role that writing plays," she says, "a very personal role."

For study participants, that social role was intensified with twice-yearly interviews by Sommers and her staff. "We were a constant in their lives," Sommers says. "We were historians of their college experiences, helping them write their intellectual autobiographies."

It's a one-on-one approach that Sommers believes would help almost anyone. "In the best of all possible worlds, it would be nice to think all students could have an adviser who read their writing, who had a deep interest in their courses."

And in the best of all worlds, she continues, a climate of language exploration would exist from the first days of kindergarten to college and beyond.

"What's really important in high school," she insists, "is for students to write a lot - in journals, in letters, in every course, they should write so that they see writing as a form of learning, and not as something contained within the English class."

Study participants said they craved more creative writing in high school, and Sommers supports that longing. "Creative writing not only connects students to things they're thinking about and the turbulent emotions of adolescence," she says, "it gives them a chance to really play with language. One of the things you want students to do in high school is to learn to love language - whatever register of language they're most comfortable with."

Sommers likens students' writing anxiety to an artistic self-doubt that often sets in somewhere between finger-painting and adulthood. "No child says, 'I can't write a poem' or 'I can't draw a rainbow,' but suddenly they're in college and they don't want to write poetry anymore. So I think it's wonderful to create a culture in high school where there's lots of writing."

She hopes her study will inspire more interest in those cultures of writing, at all levels. "The cliché of a liberal-arts education is that college in general, and writing in particular, teaches students how to think," she says. "But we don't try to nuance that enough and ask what it means to learn how to think."

That process, she says, includes developing the ability to judge information and the intellectual courage to ask questions rather than answer them.

Now it's Sommers's turn to ask questions, as she takes a sabbatical this winter to begin work on two books - one for Harvard freshmen, which will attempt to demystify the Harvard writing experience, and one for a general audience, exploring the central role of writing in college and "the ways in which students take their education to heart through writing."

Once she's through with the data, the papers will find a new home in the Harvard archives, alongside writing of Harvard students from the 19th century.

When Sommers imagines her data in this historical context, she is optimistic about the future of college papers. "There's a national anxiety about writing and writing skills, and a hearkening to a golden age, an idea that students in the 19th century wrote so much better," she says. "But I would say that the writing of these students [in the class of 2001] looks much better. The ideas are more complex, the arguments are more complex, the use of sources is more complex."

Sommers suggests that the improvement in student writing reflects an improvement in writing instruction, "a much more conscious awareness of how difficult it is to learn how to write, an awareness that it isn't a skill that one learns in one course, and it isn't a skill taught in only one subject, but that writing is the real fabric of learning."

It's a fabric Sommers has woven through years of teaching, writing, and scrawling copious comments on student papers. "My goal as a teacher," Sommers says, "is to show students how to have something at stake personally in the language they claim, so that they can know the beauty, elasticity, and power of language in the palms of their hands and on the white page spread before them."