En route to my biweekly Writing Fellows meeting, I overheard two students debating why one of them should accept a nomination to apply for a position in the program.
"Don't do it," her friend warned her. "I'm telling you, you read over all those papers and then none of your students show up to the meetings. And, if they do, what are you going to do? Edit their papers? Everything else is work for TA's and professors."
Of course, my initial reaction (had I expressed one), would have been to argue the point that we edit papers. Until I joined the program, I did not realize just how peripheral to the actual writing process a Fellow is. In the entire hour that I meet with a student, it is rare for me to mention grammar or spelling once. Our job is, ultimately, to make students become better writers, but we do this by organizing and systematizing the way they think, not the way they write.
Whatever misinformation floats around about the program, however, the most troubling message I overheard walking into my meeting was that it is somehow futile to discuss a paper with someone who lacks expertise in the subject you are writing about. Another surprise to me when I joined the program last fall was how easy it is, once expertise is factored out of the equation, to work on clarity in an argument. Writing certainly varies across disciplines, but the same problem prevails through every field, including literary critique: smart people hate to talk simply.
I do not care what discipline you study. Quantitative Economics, Political Science, Psychology, and Biology journals are often coiled in complicated language structure and so muddied by passive voice and his/her-isms that their diamonds are all but lost in the rough. Sure, they use big words. Sure, theorists put "-ization" onto the end of various nouns and ignore the little red line on their Word screen. That is what makes them theorists. But regardless of how well-versed you are in a particular discipline, one often sifts through a complicated paragraph only to conclude at the end that he (or she) could sum it up to a friend in a single sentence. The "doctor of philosophy" title does not hide the sad truth behind many of today's most hallowed academic writings: academics rarely know how to write.
Is this because they are not knowledgeable enough? Have they not read enough political science journals to have their prose flow like water? Of course not. Like a student writing a paper, they started out with an idea as gritty and strange as a kidney stone, and have polished and decorated it into something sophisticated enough to be put on display. That means that, like us, their genius ideas can be entirely muddled by the exaggerated, embellished, jargonized, juxtoposing stylistic elements with which they write their paper. Want proof? See my last sentence. A perfectly wonderful idea is quickly made to sound complex, sophisticated, and entirely incomprehensible to the majority of those who read it.
The best solution to this problem is not to have a group of fellow political science writers -- whose styles and egos will no doubt spur them to make their colleague's prose even more complicated -- sit around and critique each other's work. Rather, the best way to know if one's argument is comprehensible is to present it to someone who has no background on the topic whatsoever. Who among us has never, in utter exasperation, once thrown a copy of a paper at a roommate, crying "Just read this and tell me if it makes any sense whatsoever!"? The conversation that ensues between you and your roommate, then, originates not so much in the topic you have chosen, but in the way you have presented it -- a method of organization which, depending on how effective and clear it is, will either elucidate the pros and cons of a globalized economy or bury it forever in a heap of extra Latin characters.
Think of a Writing Fellow as an assigned late-night roommate. We are not trained in the subject you are trained in, and if a topic is strange to us, you are the authority as far as facts go. We are trained to ask questions about your topic, to provide an interested and sympathetic audience for your ideas, and to help you develop a systematic way of thinking. In this way, when you sit down to write, you will hopefully create a paper that really says something. To be a Writing Fellow is to produce, and perhaps to help become, a theorist who is not afraid to come out and say what he (or she) has come out to say.
Hilary Lustick is a Junior majoring in English
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