It seems like every first-year has a story to offer about the ubiquitous stress and exhaustion of Princeton’s Writing Seminars. My peers often mention pulling all-nighters to finish their Writing Seminar assignments, and I’ve heard countless students say that they want to drop the class altogether. Still, the general consensus among students and professors is that the Writing Seminar is a bitter medicine: it may be hard to take, but it’s good for you! As the only class that all students must take, Writing Seminar positions itself as the gateway to academic life at Princeton. As long as we do our best, Writing Seminars promise to provide a solid foundation in writing and research skills that will serve us as we navigate our junior paper, senior thesis, and beyond.
On closer inspection, however, it becomes evident that Princeton’s Writing Seminars do a poor job of introducing students to academia. Before embarking on academic research, students in Writing Seminars are introduced to two important terms: “motive” is the purpose of academic research, and “methods” are the techniques that must be employed to achieve a given motive. The “motive” of Writing Seminars is to teach students “transferable skills in critical inquiry, argument, and research methods.”
However, these seminars employ a misguided pedagogical model that neglects the discipline-specific research skills that students will actually need in their future pursuits, and their structure disincentivizes deep intellectual engagement. Therefore, if Princeton hopes to cultivate genuine intellectual inquiry, the writing program must diversify its offerings and prioritize the research process over the finished product.
All Writing Seminars incorporate an independent research assignment in which students are encouraged to develop methodological skills. However, Writing Seminars do not actually provide an introduction to distinctive research methods such as quantitative analysis, archival research, and ethnography. During the independent research unit, my professor told me that I should undertake a digital ethnography, but the only guidance I was given on this method were links to three anthropology articles. While students in the anthropology department are required to take two full courses focused on methodology in preparation for their senior thesis, I was expected to “contribute to a genuine scholarly conversation” — as my course syllabus stipulates — armed with only a few hyperlinks.
Writing Seminars attempt to make up for their lack of substantive methodological training by imposing inflexible timelines and grading structures. Real research is never predictable: a months-long literature review could reveal that an intended academic contribution is implausible, and an initial research plan could lead to a new path that requires far more time to pursue. Princeton even preaches that “any good research project” contains “intellectual twists and turns” where “the questions emerge as they proceed, often taking [students] in unexpected directions.”
Yet Writing Seminar students are given two weeks to complete a research proposal, two weeks to create a first draft, and two weeks to transform that draft into a polished product. For first-year students, who often lack previous experience in their Writing Seminar’s topic and who aren’t given proper methodological training, such a timeline is simply incompatible with intellectual nuance and exploration. In the face of tight deadlines, students have no choice but to forgo creative thinking and ambitious research aims.
Princeton is full of creative, intelligent students who love to learn. When even students who might otherwise enjoy writing regard Writing Seminars with dread, it is time to stop insisting on an approach that doesn’t work.
The assignment guidelines for my writing seminar’s first long-form essay tell students to “embrace the value of radical and—dare I say—revolutionary revision.” Indeed, I changed my entire approach to motive halfway through my first essay assignment. Though this led to many sleepless nights, it also taught me the value of change and open-mindedness.
While the project of Writing Seminar is intellectually worthwhile, its flaws make it difficult for students to reap its proposed benefits. Currently, the compressed schedule of Writing Seminar makes it difficult for first-years to pursue “revolutionary revision” without compromising their wellbeing. Additionally, rather than teaching students how to conduct research, Writing Seminars use convoluted grading practices to teach students what a finished product should look like. As a result, we are unable to fully realize our potential for motivated intellectual exploration.
But it is not too late for Princeton’s writing program to change course. Instead of applying a one-size-fits-all approach to research, Princeton must truly introduce students to the methods and writing styles of the academic fields they are passionate about. Because Writing Seminars are based on topics rather than disciplines, the 12 students in each seminar will inevitably pursue projects that require different methods. No matter how dedicated a given instructor is, it is impossible to train students in so many different methods within the span of a few weeks — especially given that students have varying levels of prior research experience.
Furthermore, the writing program’s approach to scholarship neglects entire academic fields. For example, an overwhelming majority of this semester’s 38 Writing Seminar instructors are trained in the humanities. Only four instructors have any background in scientific research, and not a single Writing Seminar focuses on artistic or creative forms of communication. Therefore, Writing Seminars fail to equip students with the skills they will need to uniquely convey ideas in all of the academic disciplines that Princeton offers.
In order to foreground methodological training, Princeton’s Writing Seminars could take inspiration from the University of Pennsylvania’s writing program, which allows students to pick between introductory writing courses geared specifically to different academic disciplines. Princeton can expand on this approach by creating seminar options tailored toward prospective chemists, legal scholars, creative writers, and more. Students should be able to engage various scholarly fields by exploring multiple seminars, and each seminar should develop tailored assignments that encourage curiosity and risk-taking rather than false perfection.
After all, every piece of real, published research is an experimental contribution to the scholarly discourse, and scholarly fields themselves are sites of constant revision. Rather than creating a distorted microcosm of academia, Princeton must open the doors to the possibility — and the imperfection — of true knowledge.
Ziyi Yan is a first-year student and a prospective History or Anthropology major. She is from Riverside, Connecticut and Shanxi, China.
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