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

Lynne Viti
Senior Lecturer
FND 33
lviti@wellesley.edu
781.283.3773
website

As a lawyer and a teacher of writing, I am particularly interested in questions of audience. Students coming to college have usually assumed, and rightly so, that they are writing papers only for an audience of one--their teacher. When students come to my class, I try to help them balance questions about finding something significant to write about, with issues about audience. Who will read their writing? Whom would they like to target, and to reach, through their writing? What assumptions do various college professors assigning papers want their students to make about the audience's prior knowledge of the subject?

My job is to prepare my students to write academic papers and to succeed as writers, both in college and in the world after college. This necessarily means that I must first help them read difficult information critically--in my courses, this means Supreme Court opinions, or films about sophisticated legal issues. Then, I must assist them in finding something interesting and engaging to write about, using those texts we probed as springboards to their own writing. I must support them as they grapple with the subject matter and construct a messy, often exploratory first draft of a paper, and then help them decide what they should save, and what they should scrap--or save for another day.

Finally, I must work with them as they revise, once again paying close attention to the audiences they are writing for. I advise students about editing, careful acknowledgement of sources,and finally, proofreading. My goal--always-- is to produce conscientious, thoughtful, articulate writers who realize that writing well is a lifelong endeavor for all of us.

For more information about my courses, research and scholarship, see my personal website

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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