“The dramatic differences surprised me,” Sommers said. “It is quite stunning the progress the students [in concentrations with tutorials] made in one year.”

Study participant Simon W. Grote ’01 agrees that his sophomore history tutorial was critical to the improvement of his writing, particularly by forcing him to express his thoughts in a way that readers other than himself could understand.

Sommers notes that some of the science concentrators in the study expressed a desire to do more writing within their concentration.

The study also showed that students generally agree that writing is an important component of their academic experience and helped them to connect with their subject in a way that merely attending lectures or studying for tests did not allow.

“Writing made me set high standards of thinking and expression,” Grote says.

While the study was primarily designed just to document the experience of undergraduates, it will offer some suggestions for ways to improve the overall writing experience.

“I think there are a few policy recommendations that will come out of this,” Sommers says, including the need for better thesis advising and the importance of high quality teaching fellows.

She also says the study has already led the expository writing program to place more emphasis on teaching first-years how to frame academic arguments, as the study demonstrated that undergraduate writing assignments often stress argumentation.

Sommers says she plans to write two books based on the results of the survey. One will be targeted to incoming Harvard first-years to inform them of what to expect in terms of writing during their four years at Harvard. The book will first be available in either 2003 or 2004.

“We want to give back the wisdom of the students [who participated in the study],” Sommers said. “We want to give [incoming] students an overview of what to expect each year. We want to give to give them the idea that they will be reading and writing all the time.”

The other book will be targeted to a broader audience, both inside Harvard and at other colleges across the nation.

“The book will describe the role of writing in undergraduate education,” Sommers says. She says the book will be a type of anthropological study, looking at the “writing culture” of Harvard.

Although the study has not yet been completed, Sommers says it has already gained significant national attention. She says teachers at other schools—including Stanford and Duke Universities—have contacted her to establish similar studies at their schools.

The study did not require a lot of effort on the part of most participants.

Most students in the study were only required to fill out an online survey once each semester concerning the experiences with writing they had had in the previous semester. A sub-sample of 65 was chosen by Sommers for more intensive study, which included a once-a-semester interview with study staff and the collection and analysis of all the papers they wrote during a semester.