As part of our regular Opinions series, “Office Hours,” we feature a range of perspectives from Swarthmore faculty on topics relevant to the Swarthmore academic community and higher education in general. We gather responses by reaching out to the entire Swarthmore faculty over email, and each contribution is edited for clarity and syntax only. We believe that students, staff, and other faculty can benefit from hearing the thoughts of their colleagues and mentors. In our seventh edition of this column, we asked professors to share their thoughts on the following question:
What makes a good writer? How should one approach the process of writing? This can be framed as advice to all students, specifically targeted to students in your particular discipline/field of study, or just a broader reflection on writing in general.
Eric Song, Professor of English Literature
What counts as good writing is context-specific. At our moment, we need writing that sounds like real humans communicating with each other. I’m not thinking of AI-generated text as the terrible alternative. At least we kind of know for now that that’s just AI mimicking us and succeeding or failing in weird ways. I’m thinking of managerial-class, lawyer-approved writing that’s in constant circulation as well as preciously self-conscious writing that qualifies everything it has to say in advance. The inability to offer any other kind of writing helps to explain our political dysfunction. A lot of people would rather read or listen to anything else, no matter how batshit the content is. The bad news is that places like our college are invested in churning out managerial-class, lawyer-approved writing outside of the classroom and, inside the classroom, preciously self-conscious writing that qualifies everything it has to say in advance.
Steve Wang, Professor of Statistics
The best writing advice I’ve ever encountered is from an article by Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent entitled “How to write anything.” If you’re a perfectionist like me, you might write by trying to make each sentence perfect before moving on to the next one. You write the first sentence, rewrite and polish and rewrite it, and only when it’s flawless do you move on to the second sentence. This inevitably results in a laborious process in which you spend an hour writing half a paragraph, growing frustrated by the lack of progress.
Felder and Brent’s insight is to separate editing from writing. It’s easier to edit a draft, even a bad draft, than to create text from scratch. So get a first draft down as quickly as possible, not worrying about making it impeccable. Even if it’s not that good, you now have something you can edit — and editing is easier than writing. Once you get used to this process, you’ll find your quick first drafts are solid, and you can polish them later — a much more efficient and satisfying workflow than trying to craft each sentence as you go.
Mark Kuperberg, Professor of Economics
My advice is “write as you read, not as you talk.” I went to an inner city elementary school where I felt I got a decent education. But there was one curious omission: I was never taught the parts of speech. When my family moved to the suburbs and enrolled me in school, I did not know what a noun or a verb was, let alone an adjective or a preposition. But I could write reasonably well; I just didn’t know that the words had names. The reason that I could write well was because I was subconsciously mimicking what I had read, and I read a decent amount. To this day, I can’t diagram a sentence. So my advice to students is that hopefully you have read a lot; if not, start now. On the other hand, in my experience, many students write how they talk. If you are writing dialogue for a story or a play, that’s fine, but not for most anything else. This is a problem for all teenagers, but it is a particular problem for minority students who have lived in segregated neighborhoods. The language they hear is not standard written English. I may get canceled for saying this, but we are not helping anyone by pretending otherwise.
Alba Newman Holmes
In the writing pedagogy course that I teach to prepare the WAs, we talk a fair amount about what counts as “good writing” and who gets to decide. We tend not to talk about what makes a “good writer,” however, because that could suggest a fixed mindset — as if you’re either a good writer or you aren’t, when scholarship (and observation) suggest otherwise. To your question about process: no one process is best for all writers — you might be a “single drafter,” who does a lot of mental composing, organizing, and revising before you get words on the page, or a “multi-drafter,” who can go through several drafts before your argument crystalizes. Stepping out of your writing habits to discover what works best for you is part of the process for college writers.
The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (developed by members of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project) identifies eight habits of mind that help students excel in writing in college. These include Curiosity, Openness (“the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world”), and Engagement (“a sense of investment and involvement in learning”). Creativity, Persistence, and Flexibility are also critical. The last two habits in the Framework are Metacognition and Responsibility — allowing students to reflect on their own writing processes and to take ownership and agency over their writing.
I might reframe the question you posed: What makes a resourceful or adaptable writer, one who can communicate effectively to different audiences? Often the first step is acknowledging your own linguistic abundance and agency — how you are already able to communicate effectively within specific communities — and then exploring what it looks like to reach beyond those. It is useful to have examples and models as you write for unfamiliar audiences. Feedback on works-in-progress can also aid the success of your texts, as a reader can tell you in real time how your writing is coming across. What makes a confident writer? Repetition, often. The more you write in a specific discipline or genre, the more effective you will be at those types of writing. Every time we are asked to write in a new way, we return to being a novice. That can be scary or frustrating, especially if we have already cultivated skills in other writing contexts that don’t quite transfer into this new setting. This is where openness and persistence are key; the more you write, the better you become at writing.
Natalie Mera Ford, Assistant Professor of English Literature
I don’t want to imply a binary where “good” and “bad” writers sit opposite one another like rivals in middle school gym class, forever fixed on whichever side of the line some random captain or teacher waved them to. So, to tweak the question, what makes up effective writing? I’d say it’s writing that keeps the audience reading, that takes them somewhere that matters, that speaks in a way they can understand and be satisfyingly challenged by, that balances show and tell so even the most erudite abstraction gets grounded in the world/galaxy/place-time we live in. I’m all for genuine voice, whether that’s sincere and clear or quirky with flourish; ideally, the writing style intra-acts with its substance so the two support and push each other to grow. Like those cool middle schoolers who stood up, crossed the dividing line, and just started to play for the intense, focused joy of the game.
Thanks for lifting up the process of writing! I’m all for it, and over as much time as you can eke out in the compressed, overloaded schedule of a semester. Approaching a writing project through gentle, exploratory, incremental steps lets you have expansive space to rethink, reread, read aloud, revise, rethink, reread, return to read aloud, etcetera, until the ideas generatively swirling in your brain have settled into a useful sequence of words on the page. At any point in this recursive, infinity-loop process, it helps to seek out a thoughtful reader’s perspective — ideally, from someone ready to give feedback that becomes feedforward (like a WA) — because we’re not alone in this endeavor. Maybe it’s too much to claim writing is a team sport. But all writers at Swarthmore have people like your professors and your peers cheering you on.
Sibelan Forrester, Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages
What makes a good writer?
Willingness to revise and sharpen arguments, being a good *reader*, choosing an idea or phenomenon that is worth writing about, and — especially for creative writing — not writing what everyone else writes or says. (So far this last element is keeping AI off the list, since by definition it is trained on what everyone else has written or said.)
Krista Thomason, Associate Professor of Philosophy
I think the maxim “know thyself” applies to writers as much as it applies to humans in general. Good writers take ownership of their writing process. Nobody is born knowing how to write, which means we all have to become writers. Becoming a writer is important because it’s how you learn how to formulate your ideas and how to communicate with others. It’s important to learn how you work as a writer. Are you someone who works better in the morning or at night? Does it help you to use an outline or not? Too often I think we stick with whatever writing strategies we are taught without reflecting on them. At some point, we need to ask ourselves what works for us and what doesn’t, and we have to know who we are as writers.
Donna Jo Napoli, Professor of Linguistics and Social Justice
Are you writing for yourself? or for strangers? or both?
The purpose of your writing matters.
We certainly write by the light of everything we’ve ever read.
But reading alone doesn’t mean we can write effectively (for a given purpose), just like understanding a mathematics proof doesn’t mean we can prove something (even closely related) on our own.
I believe that you can be taught/groomed in your writing, so that you can increase your efficacy — and I believe those who can help you most are of two types. One type is the writing teacher that actually writes the stuff you are aiming to write herself with success (however success is defined for that sort of writing). The other type is the target audience of your writing — if they don’t understand, you need to grapple with that.
My strongest advice to writers who are writing for themselves and strangers is write. Write write write.
And be brave: share your writing. Consider reactions. Some reactions may fall flat (although maybe six months later or six years later they may make sense to you). But other reactions will ring true to you (right now). So write the next thing better, using what you learned, just like you do when you take a math test and bomb — you don’t take the same math test over and over — you study the concepts and take another math test and apply those concepts to new problems. keep writing new things. after you’ve written maybe a half dozen arguments/papers/stories/whatever, you can look back over them and see what has promise and consider rewriting it. But certainly do not spin your wheels in place on a single work. your time is precious. don’t let anyone waste it.
On the other hand, don’t fail your W course because of my advice.
Moriel Rothman-Zucker, Visiting Assistant Professor of English Literature
At least as far as creative writing is concerned — though I think this applies to other disciplines, as well — one of my definitions for “what makes good writing” is as follows: writing which is not boring to the person who wrote it, or, phrased otherwise, writing in which the writer manages to surprise herself.
Patrick Banner, Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics & Astronomy
When writing, whether it’s a resume for a job application or a scholarly article about black holes, a good writer should aim to do two things: use the reader’s expectations and make the reader feel something.
Readers come to every text expecting to find certain things in certain places, so your writing should make use of those expectations. A job recruiter will throw away your resume if they can’t find your name and experience at a glance. In a scientific journal article, a reader will be looking for you to motivate your work in the introduction so they can learn why they should care what you did. Readers will also use transition words, paragraph breaks, section headings, what you choose to say first, how many words you spend on one idea versus another, and many other cues to help them interpret your writing. You control all of these things when you write, so you can shape how others understand your work. (Of course, subverting your readers’ expectations sometimes can be useful, too. But you still have to know the expectations in order to subvert them.)
Good writing also makes the reader feel something. You are guiding your readers through a path in your mind; a guide should make sure nobody wanders from the path and nobody trips on rocks, but the guide should also encourage their group to take in the view, listen to the birds, and smell the roses. Even the most technical work has its roses to smell: introductions and conclusions to scholarly work should talk about why the work matters in big, lofty terms, and in the body of the work, you should make the reader feel in their gut that your argument is true. Along the way, every paragraph and every sentence has its own rhythm that every reader feels as they read. Your words can build, reinforce, or, for instance, by introducing some extra unnecessary words in the wrong place that might add a useful detail but do so at an inappropriate moment in the text, destroy that rhythm. (Was that sentence as painful for you to read as it was for me to write? It should have been “Your words can build, reinforce, or destroy that rhythm.”)
To help you determine whether your writing is accomplishing these goals, I suggest two things. (1) Read your writing out loud. Feel the sentences as they come out of your mouth, and imagine your audience is listening and reacting to you. Do you think your reader-listeners remember how an idea fits in your argument, or do you need to remind them? Which sentences feel awkward, and which hit you in your gut? (2) Have someone else read your work, ask for honest and thoughtful feedback, and iterate. It’s hard to predict what passages in your writing will confuse or persuade others; asking others to read helps remove the guesswork. These two strategies can help you make sure your readers are staying on the path and smelling the roses along the way.
Megan Brown, Associate Professor of History
My own best writing occurs when I let go of perfectionism and also leave myself enough time to revise and edit my work. Even though sometimes I feel attached to a particularly lovely or witty phrase, openness to criticism — including deleting or rephrasing whole sections of my work — has made my final product stronger. Broadly, the same is true for students in my classes: It is better to turn in something that you wish was more polished than not to turn in anything at all. Revision and editing are necessary for writers at all stages of their studies or careers, and we cannot rely on technology to do that work for us. Taking advice from others, whether at the Writing Center or elsewhere, leads to clearer, more convincing writing.
Lette Bragg, Visiting Assistant Professor of English
Can we shift our attention from the “good writer” to the “good paper” (or the “good” essay, report, article, or question)? Writing is so hard to pin down, I find. For me, writing is thinking, time, a thing I love, frustration, labor, ethics, responsibility (and irresponsibility), commitment, risk, and vulnerability. I write to think, and I do so out of dependence and gratitude rather than aptitude. A paper, on the other hand, is something I can hold and share. It has a beginning and an end. I can give it a title.
Shifting our attention to something material like a paper does not flatten the question of writing. The paper is not (only) the screen or page on which it is composed. Beautiful papers are full of texture. When you build a paper, you do not sit down and write as you might read, moving from beginning to end. A “good” paper untangles a knot of an idea, turning it around, following different threads. Although we can make a paper “good” through different strategies, few of these prioritize smoothness or polish. Most emphasize organicity or integrity. These strategies help us see, understand, and accept our paper’s limits and reach, why it exists, how it came into being, how different parts relate to one another, how this paper sits in relation to other texts and compositions.
Sometimes, when we look at a paper, seeing it as an object in the world, we are tempted to depersonalize it, to imagine it was produced out of some inaccessible knowledge world. But the work of the paper is to enter spaces of knowing on one’s own terms. That is, when we say of the paper, this is “good,” we do not leave it as an object. We invite in our generosity, our understanding of constraints, genre, and craft. In this way, we put ourselves in the game. The question of the “good” writer could then be phrased otherwise: how does writing a paper (or essay, question, or response) get us back into the world, with others? How does writing give us a precision of thinking so that we are relieved, for a moment, of the tangle of our minds?
