For the first time in a long time, Nancy Sommers looks relaxed.

She has reason to be. The Marius Era in the Expository Writing program--a tortuous 15-year period which saw the program advance even as teacher morale plunged--is over. Sommers, the longtime associate director to Richard C. Marius, is now firmly in charge.

"She has been open and wonderful," gushes one Expos teacher, who had previously been a critic of the program. "Change comes slowly, but things are looking up."

Sommers is pursuing some reforms inside Expos, but many of her ideas are for the Harvard curriculum as a whole.

"I want Expos to be an anchor for students in their writing at Harvard," Sommers says. "It should introduce them to the common ground for what is considered good writing at Harvard."

Sommers wants to make writing a more important part of classes, and she has already convinced some professors to introduce writing assignments that resemble those used in the Expos program. Last year, she helped professors Joseph Koerner and Diana L. Eck incorporate more writing into their classes.

This year, Sommers is consulting with Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature Gregory Nagy for his popular core course Literature and Arts C-14: "The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization." And her deputy, Gordon Harvey, is working with sophomore tutorials in government.

Nagy says he is ecstatic about the changes to writing assignments in "Heroes." The number of papers in the class has stayed constant--two--but now there are sequenced writing assignments, due each week in section, which lead up to each paper. In a way, it's just like Expos.

"The way a participant gets the best of the course is to hand in weekly writing assignments," Nagy says.

The professor also says he is changing the class so that paper topics follow directly out of lectures. Students will enjoy writing papers more, he and Sommers reason, if they are better integrated into the course.

Sommers is also hoping to make a public splash with her report on undergraduate writing at Harvard, which is scheduled to be released next week.

"My goal is to change students' writing experiences at Harvard from a series of fragmented assignments to one integrated experience," she says.

Towards that goal, Expos will be more standardized under Sommers. She wants the program to focus entirely on "writing about texts," which is a skill every Harvard student must have.

Sommers says she decided to focus the program in this way after collecting a volume's worth of paper assignments. "We're trying to find out what's common to Harvard writing assignments," she says.

In recent years, Expos teachers have described their program as an island, with little more than a footbridge connecting it to the rest of the curriculum. Students were expected to write one way in Harvard's first-year writing program and another way in their classes. Sommers says she wants to change that.

Changing Attitudes