Writing
Academic Program Introduction
Writing is a powerful tool for building knowledge and engaging with the world. All students take one semester of First-Year Writing (FYW), working closely with faculty who offer a lively, practical introduction to college-level academic writing. Courses are designed around a wide array of inspiring topics, and they provide a supportive community in which students share their ideas, practice writing and revision, conduct research, and develop speaking and presentation skills.
Beyond FYW courses, the program offers an advanced writing workshop and tutorial as well as a selection of upper-level writing courses. It also operates a thriving peer writing-tutor program.
Learning goals
Students who have completed a first-year writing course will be able to:
- Approach writing as an evolving process that requires brainstorming, drafting, sharing, reflecting, and revision.
- Understand the mechanisms of sentence structure and writing design that produce precise and reader-friendly prose.
- Write with an attentiveness to genre, medium, and audience.
- Make appropriate choices regarding language, register, evidence, and argument.
- Locate, analyze, and evaluate different types of sources, and integrate them into evidence-based writing.
- Write with purpose and have a stake in their ideas.
Research highlights
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In Expanding Natick History (2022–2023), a project directed by Lecturer Erin Battat in partnership with the Natick Historical Society, students researched the colonization of the town of Natick, created public activities at the Natick Farmers Market, and facilitated conversations with local residents about the past and how it is remembered today.
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Senior Lecturer Heather Corbally Bryant recently published her 11th collection of poetry, The Coffin Makers (Finishing Line Press, 2023).
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Senior Lecturer Justin Armstrong’s book Anthropology, Islands, and the Search for Meaning in the Anthropocene was published by Routledge in 2022.
Course highlights
Intensive Writing Workshop
WRIT201
This course will help students become more confident and proficient in the writing that they do at Wellesley and beyond. Students will design an individualized syllabus around a topic of interest to them and focus on the areas of writing in which they most want to improve. Building on what they learned in their 100-level WRIT course, students will become more adept at working with sources, developing their thinking, and communicating their ideas clearly and purposefully. There will be two class meetings per week. In one, all students will meet as a group with the professor, engaging in writing workshops and discussing some short common readings. In the second meeting, students will meet individually with a TA to discuss readings on their own topic and to work on their writing.
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Black Feminism and the Future
WRIT178
In this course, we will examine Black feminist essays and speculative fiction as resources for thinking about the future of feminism and its impact on the broader culture. These texts are helping to shift paradigms of what is understood by the term “feminism”. They also contain critical information that students need not just to survive but thrive in the future. We will discuss how these works offer new ways to think about kinship, gender, reproductive rights, abolition, and representations of selfhood. In addition, they will provide a springboard for looking inward to our own lives and perspectives, as we explore how writing, reading, and action are influenced by the personal. Indeed, if the “personal is political,” as Audre Lorde aptly stated, then what we write from our own experience can shape and change our world. -
On the Clock: Capitalism and the Politics of Time
WRIT171
“Free time is shackled to its opposite,” writes the critic Theodor Adorno. In a world full of incessant demands for productivity, our free time, he observed, never feels truly free. We’re always watching the clock, trying to get the most out of our workday and then using our down time to ready ourselves to work again. We may be managing our time, but we don’t really own it. This course asks: what does it mean to live your life ‘on the clock’, and what might it look like to get ‘off’ of it? What would make your time feel like it is genuinely your own? We’ll seek answers to these questions first by exploring the issue of time management, reading theories about how to do it as well as histories and critiques of the impulse to maximize your time. Next, we’ll take up political and theoretical perspectives on how capitalism shapes our relationship to time. We’ll discuss where we get the idea that time is money and something we can spend or save. We’ll also consider what it means that our time is something we can sell and that someone else can own, and we’ll ask what the stakes are of commodifying time that way. Last, we’ll examine the idea and practice of leisure and explore what it takes for free time to be truly free.
Opportunities
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Writing tutors
Students of all class years can meet with trained peer tutors to discuss any aspect of their writing or the writing process. Rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors may apply to work as a tutor and contribute to the strong writing culture at Wellesley.
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Internships
The Writing Program and the Department of English and Creative Writing jointly sponsor funded summer internships at Slate, W.W. Norton & Company, Maven Screen Media, Calligraph, and Speculum.
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Prizes
The Writing Program recognizes excellence through awards for first-year writing, and writing in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities. These awards are generously endowed by the Three Generations Fund. The program also administers the Rebecca Summerhays Award for Growth in Writing.
Writing Program
106 Central Street
Wellesley, MA 02481