Louisa Gilder '00 writes on The importance of being personally invested in your writing

My freshman year, I never asked myself why I spent so much more time working on my studio art projects than on my English papers. I would spend countless hours late at night and into the morning laboring over a drawing, my hands and face covered with charcoal in the basement of my dorm, listening to the rolling stones. I would agonize over them until I was sure they were perfect, not being able to bear submitting something that was less than I knew how to do.

My papers, on the other hand, I would write as quickly as possible, checking "word count" every paragraph in case by some miracle I had extended the paper to three pages in the last five sentences. I viewed them as irritating assignments and only put enough energy into them to get by.

But when I thought seriously about this situation, I realized how ludicrous it was that I viewed a drawing as a part of myself, but that I saw a paper as no more personal than a multiple choice test. I have learned that it is important to view a paper as a work of art that you are creating, and not the answer to a question your professor asked or a job that you must complete. I found that when I approached my paper with this in mind, I became so much more wrapped up in the outcome of the paper and how I put it together. It is worth it to get excited about what you are writing about, to find an angle that you truly identify with or want to think about in more detail. You will find that you are left with an essay or research paper that you will be glad that you have written and that you will look back on it long after you have forgotten what the assignment was or the name of the class.

Leda Eizenberg '00 writes on The value of outlining after you write

My favorite way to improve structure and ensure that my paper supports its thesis is to make an outline AFTER the paper is written, based on the draft itself. I state the thesis, and put this idea at the top of the outline. Then I go through the paper, pulling out the main ideas and prime examples from each paragraph and use them to form the body of the outline. From there, I get a general idea of the paper's movement, and each idea's relevance becomes clear. I then leave what is good, move what is out of place, and scrap what does not fit. I find this process to be the best way to really improve a paper; it enables a writer to step back from her work, which makes for a more objective, and thus better, critic.

Rita Mitchell '00 writes on Clarity

My best piece of advice for students writing essays is to say what you mean. One of the most difficult aspects of writing is getting what is in your head onto the page. So often, what we imagine ourselves saying is not actually what comes across to our reader. One frequent result is that we write long, tangly, confused sentences, like this one, trying to include as much information as we can, saying it in as many different ways as we can, so that our reader will somehow be illuminated with the understanding and logic that exists in our own minds. This rarely happens in practice. Instead, the reader faces a confused and tangly argument with no visible point. While beautiful prose is certainly a wonderful stylistic plus to any paper, it is useless if the organization and argument of the paper is lost in beautiful, but meaningless, phrasing. SO, try to be concise. Use topic sentences. Try to stick to the practice of 1 Idea = 1 Paragraph. Read your paper aloud to see if you yourself get lost in your prose. And read your paper to someone else if you can, to see if your argument convinces him or her in the way that it should.