As part of an effort to show the world that Expos teachers are more than just Expos teachers, four professional writers who teach in the freshman program yesterday spoke in a first-ever forum about their job experience and how it affects their approach to the close.

The writers, who all work for newspapers or are laboring at books, all agreed that using teachers who write for a living is one of the best aspects of the programs, the only course required of all Harvard under-graduates.

"Writers may understand writing in a less esoteric way than academics." said Pelicia Lamport, who writes the honorous "Muse of the Week in Review" column about current events for the Boston Sunday Globe. As a result, a writer is often more empathetic to students with writing problems than a professor who is not an active writer, Lamport said.

"I care more about language than almost anything else in the world," said Nancy Kline Piore, a fiction writer who is in the process of turning one of her novels into a play. "Most writers feel this way, We bring this into our teaching."

But another Expos teacher who doubles as a humourist for the Globe, Sanford Kreisberg, joked that he had learned "to be very kind to less talented students-because ten years from now they may be your editor".