I have been thinking lately about writing, the process of distilling a set of ideas into a glyph form of communication occasionally accompanied by figures. It is exceedingly difficult.
Good writing is also exceedingly important. Whether by textbooks or by journal articles, academics are measured largely by their publications. Business communication is nearly always in a written form and poorly written communication can impact repeat business. Engineering students are notorious for believing that they do not need to develop their writing skills, that their job will be to calculate, not to write. Yet one of the most important steps in any calculation is deciding to perform the calculation at all, and an engineer will have a hard time conveying why they did the calculation (or, even more important, why they did not do the calculation) if they cannot compose a well-written statement. Not all writing needs to be exquisite, of course, but nearly everyone needs to craft a well written document occasionally.
These thoughts have been stirred by my experience with undergraduate writing. I have worked with undergrads both as a teaching assistant and as the head of an independent study project and I am consistently taken aback by the lack of quality in their writing. Undergraduate writing is typically scattered and disorganized. There is no narrative arc, or if it exists it is tenuous. Even when there is a conceptual direction, their writing is consistently littered with impertinent details that distract from that heading. Yet my writing was once like this. What caused my writing to improve, and how might I use this to improve my students’ writing in the future?
I believe that my writing has improved over time, but a specific window of rapid improvement comes to mind. I distinctly remember being a poor writer at the end of my second year in grad school, and a particularly mediocre term paper comes to mind. In contrast, I have never felt as good about my writing as when I wrote my thesis preliminary proposal, roughly two years later. The fifteen pages of that proposal were the easiest I have ever written. Over the span of two years, my writing changed dramatically. Why?
In short, through my teaching and reading I found a pedagogic voice, and through programming I developed a habit of continuous review and refinement.
During this two-year period of transition from the term paper to the thesis proposal, the only technical reading that did not put me to sleep were books on programming. Most of my research at the time involved writing simulations, and the programming books that I read offered practical advice on how to get my job done. Chief among these was The Practice of Programming. This book was very well written and had a pedagogic voice that meshed with my experience as a TA: the writer is a teacher who wants his or her readers to learn something by the end. This approach to technical writing was new to me, a sharp contrast to most of the books and papers that I read at the time. My teaching and my consumption of well-written books taught me to write with a grounded, enthusiastic voice, eager to teach and focused on the reader’s comprehension.
In addition to discovering a tone of voice, The Practice of Programming also taught me to write good code. Indeed, I wrote lots of code (and still do), and the suggestions in the book gave me mental benchmarks against which I could measure my writing. I began choosing better variable names and adding meaningful code comments. Suddenly, I had clear goals for what constituted well-written code, and I began to carefully review it for clarity. This process of review slowly grew into a habit, and this habit, which I developed for writing code, was directly applicable to my writing in English. In short, learning to be a better programmer taught me an important skill to be a better writer.
All of this culminated in the writing of my thesis proposal. Compared to the term paper from two years prior, I had a clear sense of voice that I wanted to put forth, and I had a strong habit of critical review. I had also recently switched topics and had an enormous enthusiasm for my new area of research. Conveying the details of my work was a joy, and in contrast to my term paper in which I was a student writing for my professor, I became a teacher with my committee as my pupils. I wanted to teach, not prove that I had learned.
The two key pieces of this process—finding a teacher’s voice and developing a habit of critical review—require time and practice. We cannot develop an instructive voice in our undergraduates until we teach them to teach. Enthusiasm to convey an idea is not enough: the student must learn to teach their audience. Similarly, we cannot build within them a habit of critical review until they have some wish to perfect their work. In my case, I aimed at well-written code so that I or the graduate student who came after me could return to it and understand what I was trying to achieve. If a student does not care about the quality of his or her productive output, it is very unlikely they will review their work for clarity and brevity. Two-page essays that are discarded after they are graded will never serve as a vehicle to teach engineering students how to write.
And so I leave this as an open question: how do we revise our pedagogy to produce better writers? Teaching our students to teach and endowing them with the habit of critical review ought to be the hallmarks of the liberal-arts education. What have we missed? What have we lost? What can we change in our departments and our course listings in the coming decades that will enable our students to create well-formed articulations of their thinking?
—David Mertens