Wellesley College Writing Program: Faculty

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer's estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality.
-Annie Dillard

Writing Program Faculty

Adam Schwartz
Assistant Professor
FND 124B
aschwar1@wellesley.edu
781.283.3772

The core faculty of the Writing Program are all professional writing teachers who bring a wide range of experience to their teaching. We are linguists, lawyers, memoirists, journalists and fiction writers. I am a fiction writer(my stories have been published in The New Yorker and numerous anthologies) and have been teaching expository writing for twenty years. My writing courses at Wellesley have mainly focused on the short story, though recently I have taught writing courses on Anne Frank and Native American literature.

The most fundamental way in which my experience as a fiction writer informs my expository writing courses is through my emphasis on writing as a process. Many of the challenges I face writing fiction -- how to come up with ideas, how to bend, shape and revise those ideas, how to overcome resistance and doubt -- are the same challenges faced by students in Writing 125 courses. Similarly, many of the rewards of writing fiction -- surprising myself with an un-expected insight, surpassing my own expectations -- are the same rewards I encourage my students to experience in their own writing.

My expository writing courses are based on the notion that academic essays and stories share many of the same qualities. Both forms require us to create meaning out of our ideas and experiences, and to structure that meaning in a compelling and instructive manner. In my courses we examine stories both as a literary form and as a rhetorical model. Our understanding of stories continually inform our strategies for writing academic essays.

Finally, and most importantly, I believe in establishing a supportive and instructive writing classroom. I want my students to both recognize the difficulties of writing to have confidence that they can master those challenges.

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Lynne Viti and Wini Wood
Wellesley College Writing Program
Created by: Karyn Lu '01
Date Created: June 29, 2000
Expires: July 31, 2009