As the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at MML, I offer one-to-one writing sessions for all members of the faculty. One of the pleasures of my job is that I see students (and, occasionally, staff) at every stage of their writing lives. Over the course of this year, conversations have moved between first-year tutorial essays, finalist collections, MSt and MPhil dissertations, DPhil chapters, job applications, conference abstracts, and everything in between. The subjects have varied wildly. In a single week, I might discuss Beckett’s late prose, Soviet film, Afro-German literature, French feminist theory, medieval crusade biographies, the gaucho novel, or the structure of a commentary on ETA Hoffmann.
Despite this extraordinary variety, certain patterns recur with uncanny consistency. MML students often arrive believing they have a ‘writing problem’. They worry that their prose isn’t ‘erudite’ enough, that they won’t be able to generate an appropriately ‘academic’ style, or that everybody else somehow knows the hidden rules of Oxford essay-writing (if these actually exist, dear reader, you are very welcome to send them to me). Typically, though, the deeper difficulty lies elsewhere. The real challenge is conceptual: how to identify an argument, how to trust a line of thought, and how to distinguish between material that serves the essay and material that hasn’t earned its keep.
One of the best moments in tutorials is the one in which a student grasps that they don’t need to reproduce everything they have read. It can be easy to feel half-buried under secondary literature before you’ve even started – and in critical essays particularly, it’s tempting to assume that authority lies elsewhere: in the existing scholarship, or the specialised vocabulary of your discipline. Part of my work is simply to redirect attention back towards the primary text and the student’s own response to it. The most common intervention I make is surprisingly simple: show me the thesis.
Usually, the breakthrough comes when the question itself is unpacked slowly enough to reveal that it already contains the beginnings of an original argument. A student who has been struggling to find a way into an essay suddenly sees that she is already thinking critically. In another instance, someone who believes his writing lacks sophistication discovers that clarity isn’t the enemy of complexity; that if your ideas are complex, in fact, they require a simple and robust vehicle to survive the journey. Finalists revising for closed-book exams will realise that the papers aren’t testing memory, but whether you can recognise patterns quickly and turn them into a conceptual argument under time pressure. Or first-year students, used to the colour-by-numbers certainties of school essays, will start to appreciate, with visible relief, that university writing allows room for nuance and radical independence. Independence is vital. So is a sense of play. If this isn’t fun, why are we doing it?
Over the year, I’ve come to feel that these aren’t really ‘writing problems’ at all. Questions of structure and style are normally bound up with questions of permission and intellectual ownership. Students can be afraid to make a claim unless they can attach it to an established source, or they’re convinced that academic prose must sound dense in order to be legitimate. Some become trapped in perfectionism and open-ended reading, postponing the moment of writing because they imagine they must know exactly what they think before they begin. Yet writing itself is often the means by which thinking is revealed.
These sessions are full of humour and revelation. There’s nothing more satisfying than the tutorial in which a student traces the shape of an argument that had previously felt unreachable, or when a dissertation topic that used to be impossibly broad acquires a clear conceptual spine – or a tangled introduction becomes, in a student’s words, ‘like a map now’. Or someone leaves a session laughing because the task that had seemed overwhelming now appears manageable.
Working across the Faculty also offers a privileged glimpse of the extraordinary intellectual range of MML students. What continually strikes me isn’t simply their ability, though that is considerable, but their ambition: their willingness to tackle difficult texts, more than one language, abstract ideas, and highly original comparative projects. The challenge is never a lack of intelligence. It’s learning to trust your intelligence enough to express it clearly on the page. This is what being an RLF Fellow is really about: helping students recognise when they are already thinking well.