Sommers and her staff chose 65 students to study more closely. These students are interviewed twice a year and submit copies of all their writing.

"Doing an in-depth interview about my paper-writing process every semester forces me to put into words what exactly that process is, and even where I could make changes in the process to do better," says Shauna L. Shames '01, a study participant.

Last summer Terrence Tivnan '69, a lecturer at the Graduate School of Education, analyzed the results from the first survey.

Over the summer Walk and Laura Saltz, preceptor in expository writing, wrote profiles of the interview data analysis.

The profiles attempted "to give a sense of each student's personality, his/her experience of the freshman year and his/her strengths and weaknesses as a writer," Saltz says.

The Results Are In

Last summer's data show that first years write, and write a lot. The average is 13 papers in the first year, with 25 percent of the class writing 16 to 22 papers.

"Writing can be said to define a Harvard education," Walk says.

Sommers says that the results show that students feel "something more, something deeper" is required in college writing as opposed to writing done in high school.

Shames says she has perceived this difference between high school and college as well. "It was up to us to figure out connections in the readings, to draw our own conclusions. All this was very different from high school, where you were usually given avery clear question or argument to respond to."

Moreover, Saltz says, college writing proved tobe a form of self-discovery for first-years. "Formany students, learning to write at college wastantamount to discovering that they were someonewith things to say," Saltz says.

Sommers says that those students who wrote alot "had a sense of scholarly belonging" and thatthere were several examples of teaching fellowsand Faculty "who had made a difference."

Students who took moral reasoning or philosophycourses made especially large gains in theirwriting, something Sommers attributes to the "verydifferent kind of writing and topics" in thosetypes of classes.

"Students were inspired by their professors,who showed them a new way to think about subjects,including religion, that already meant a greatdeal to them," Saltz says.

The intellectual rigor of these disciplinesalso tended to drive first-years to refine theirwriting, she adds.

"Students must learn to close read and to arguea point, and our hypothesis is that these twothings--close reading and arguing--are important"in writing for philosophy and moral reasoningclasses, she says.