Five Ways to Celebrate and Cultivate Humanity in Academic Writing

Note: This article is adapted from Erik Ellis' 2025 September Sessions workshop.

Worried about students using AI in your PWR classes? Ten years ago, in his closing remarks during September Sessions, Marvin offered sage advice that has fresh resonance in today’s era of ChatGPT. He said, “Invite your students to tell the best stories they can about the world.” He asked, “Do you remember people who think in terms of argumentative categories? No, you remember people who tell stories.” Encouraging students to tell stories in their essays—and to craft their entire essays as narratives that capture their evolving curiosity and thinking—is one way to cultivate humanity in academic writing. In this session, we’ll explore concepts such as voice and presence (beyond first person) that can help students write compelling essays that are uniquely and powerfully their own.

1. Teach writing as inquiry

It’s easy—well, pretty easy—to emphasize research as inquiry. But if we invite students to think of writing as inquiry, we open up more opportunities for them to craft essays that they’ll find meaningful and that their readers will find engaging and persuasive. Instead of asking students to bonk readers over the head early with blunt objects—thesis statements—we can invite them to start with their own curiosity and create what former NYU Expository Writing Program director Pat C. Hoy II calls “one of the cherished gifts afforded to reader and writer alike: a picture of a mind thinking" (45)¹. Of course, students have to be genuinely curious about their topics, or else there’s nothing to explore—no ambivalence or uncertainty to grapple with. And we have to give them opportunities to experience writing as thinking, as exploration. Freewriting is one option, but here are two structured forms of exploratory writing that arguably flow more easily into final essays.

Letter to a friend

Invite students to reflect on the work they’re analyzing or the topic they’re researching in an informal letter to an actual friend. Letters are a great way to get students to grapple with meaning in a way that’s fresh and real and often so compelling that they can use much of their letters in their drafts. (Here is more information on the letter assignment with details, tips, and examples. I made this for September Sessions 2023.) Rather than have to retroactively recreate their thinking process in their final essay, which can feel watered down and distant, students can revise parts of their letters so that readers can, as Hoy puts it, “savor the twists and turns of the essayist’s mind playing over rich material, entertaining doubt, wrestling with ambiguities.”²

Dramatic Scene

That’s right—a scene: a vividly rendered nonfiction account of a specific and meaningful lived experience. Students usually have some kind of personal investment in the topics they choose. And they often have stories from experience that connect either directly or indirectly. Instead of silencing these stories, encourage students to use them as evidence in their essays.

But first they need to bring these stories to life, with significant details, dialogue, etc. Unlike most “hooks,” which feel like perfunctory one-paragraph performances, scenes immerse us. They unfold. They’re longer, and they don’t feel guilty about being longer, because they know their legitimate purpose is to engage us, orient us, and create a feeling of identification—a prerequisite for persuasion. Far from being “fluff,” these scenes—call them stories if you like—can be powerful invitations to readers to connect with the writer in a uniquely human way.

“Beginnings of essays,” according to Columbia University’s Director of Undergraduate Writing Programs Nicole B. Wallack, “are contractual as well as invitational: to succeed they must communicate to readers what questions, concerns, and ideas the essay will explore, and they must tempt readers to linger for the unfolding” (79)³. A well-crafted, immersive scene can tempt readers for the unfolding better than a short, stingy hook—and certainly better than a businesslike pronouncement. Scenes can also open up more creative, rhetorical possibilities for structuring essays. For example, a student might want to intersperse a scene (or scenes) strategically throughout their essay (perhaps in italics) to create a narrative that runs parallel to or amplifies their main essayistic voice.

And speaking of voice, students are more likely to have one if we validate the importance of their experiences—their lives as human beings. Whereas a hook leading to a blah second or third paragraph of conventional academic writing makes us sigh and hunker down for the long haul, a scene engages us longer, immerses us more deeply, and implicitly promises us that we’re in the hands of a talented writer who wants to engage us and has the skills and motivation to do so beyond this scene.

Say you start your essay about the impact of tourism on Hawaii and the Hawaiian culture with a vivid scene of yourself dancing hula for a big hotel’s cheesy luau⁴. A tourist in a lime green Tommy Bahamas silk shirt asks if you can do a “real” hula move like Jane Blackman in Elvis’s Blue Hawaii. You wish you could knock some sense into him, but you can only smile. The whole time, you feel as fraudulent as the fake plumeria flowers in your hair. You wish the tourism industry in Hawaii would value your true Hawaiian culture, your authentic ancient hula, and your sense of self—your identity. You wish you didn’t have to “sell out” your culture.

Starting your essay with a vivid scene that captures this experience with a close degree of psychic distance will likely make readers want to keep reading your essay. And it will answer a question that too often lingers: “Why are you writing about this?” But again, a scene also puts the pressure on you to keep readers engaged. The good news is that if you’ve already established a strong voice and presence in your scene, you can use that momentum to write the rest of your essay.

If a student has no relevant scene or doesn’t want to write about their own experience, invite them to write a different kind of scene: a vivid account of the future—specifically, a hypothetical future in which we see played out the logical implications of their topic according to one course of action or stream of logic. To help students appreciate the potential persuasive power of this type of scene, read aloud in class (with volunteers) the last four pages of Kathryn Schulz’s 2015 New Yorker essay “The Really Big One,” starting at the bottom of the third column on the fifth page (“The first sign that the Cascadia earthquake has begun will be a compressional wave, radiating outward from the fault line” (56)⁵. Schulz’s essay won a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and a National Magazine Award.

Here is how I frame the scene assignment, which has an additional option, in my PWR 1 syllabus.

2. Celebrate human voice and presence

In “Refusing Generative AI in Writing Studies,” Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Megan McIntyre, and Maggie Fernandez argue that the discipline of writing studies “stands against linguistic homogenization, which is accelerated and advanced by GenAI.”⁶ I would argue that there’s already way too much linguistic homogenization in academic writing even without GenAI. We should embrace the spirit of “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” and encourage students to cultivate and take pride in their individual writerly voices and their human presence on the page. Instead, we too often shush students and tell them to conform. Perhaps we do this because our teachers shushed us into learned helplessness or because we crave the gravitas of disciplinary legitimacy that we think we’ll gain by teaching only rigid genre conventions. Or maybe, like Constitutional originalists, we think “academic writing” must forever remain frozen in time. If academic writing has historically meant dull, formal prose, then that’s what it must always be.

Yet as Helen Sword points out in Stylish Academic Writing, which analyzes scholarly writing across the disciplines,

academic writing is a process of making intelligent choices, not of following rigid rules. Yes, scholars in some fields have more freedom than others to make stylistic decisions that go against the disciplinary grain. Yes, convention remains a powerful force. Even in the most seemingly inflexible situations, however—for example, in journals where all research reports must conform to a rigid structural template—authors can still decide whether to write clear, concise, energetic sentences or opaque, complex, passive ones. Scientists can choose to use active verbs. Social scientists can choose to eschew disciplinary jargon. Informed choice is the stylish writer’s best weapon against the numbing forces of conformity and inertia. (30)

One way to help students value the rhetorical power of a strong human voice and presence in academic writing is to analyze contrasting example of published scholarly writing. I created a teaching activity to help students do exactly this: “How to Use Sources Without Losing Your Voice.” Here is the overview of and rationale for this activity, which includes links to the folder with a related presentation and handouts.

3. Teach students to write essays.

Um, isn’t this a given? Well, apparently not—not if we’re talking about essays that capture students’ voices and intellectual journeys. According to Robert Atwan, the series editor of The Best American Essays, “What was especially maddening about the typical five-paragraph theme had less to do with its tedious structure than with its implicit message that writing should be the end product of thought and not the enactment of its process” (p. xi). He called the five-paragraph essay “a charade. It not only paraded relentlessly to its conclusion; it began with its conclusion. It was all about its conclusion. Its structure permitted no change of direction, no reconsideration, no wrestling with ideas. It was—and still is—the perfect vehicle for the sort of reader who likes to ask: ‘And your point is . . .?’” (p. xii). In other words, it—or, rather, its glorified non-five-paragraph contemporary academic counterpart—is the perfect vehicle for impatient readers who don’t care much about writers as thinking human beings.

By contrast, as Peter Elbow points out in “The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization in Writing,” “Writing straight into perplexity often leads us to create structures that pull readers in and pull them along. It also helps us as writers, leading us to more ideas and richer thinking and usually helping us untangle confusion more quickly than when we stop and merely ‘think.’ [. . .]” (638). Elbow practices what he preaches. His 46-page, 57-source essay is an excellent example of academic writing. “My goal,” he points out,” is to persuade readers to enter an experience in time, not just an out-of-time grasping of concepts” (639). This is excellent advice for our students as well.

“It’s hard,” though, Elbow explains, “to pull off the rhetorical strategy of withholding one’s main point. This explains why teachers so often insist on the anti-perplexity structure of announcing the main point in a thesis sentence at the start.” He continues:

But I’m not just looking for the easiest way to avoid reader confusion. If that were all I wanted, I could simply preach the five-paragraph essay. I’m trying to understand form as a source of energy. Story is the most obvious source, and harnessing perplexity exploits a genuine kind of story for analytic expository writing—a journey from perplexity to resolution.
When a writer invites and articulates perplexity, we see someone, in effect, of two minds (or more than two). Writing from perplexity invites us to do justice to both minds or multiple opinions—one at a time or in debate. Thus it harnesses not just narrative but drama. It’s sad how many essays are shallow because the writer had only one mind—succumbing to the pressure to make it up before starting. Even when perplexity leads us to a single and exact conclusion that we could present all-at-once in a bird’s-eye claim, we have a better chance of making readers experience that claim and be pulled through our text if we find some way to do justice to the conflict that gave rise to it. (639-40)

That conflict is a fundamentally human conflict—the writer’s conflict.

4. Encourage students to ask questions in their essays

You could be 100% opposed to students using first person but still invite them to create a strong presence by asking questions in their essays. Using questions as transitions is a concrete strategy well worth teaching students who want to engage and persuade readers. Direct, unfiltered, present-tense questions often work best, because they create the most immediacy, the closest psychic distance. Readers feel like they’re in the trenches with the writer as they search for understanding. Here’s what I write about questions on my PWR 2 RBA assignment sheet:

One excellent way to engage readers and make them feel more invested in your essay is to ask questions. Invite readers to share your own curiosity, as if you’re thinking while writing. Then ask more questions as transitions to new ideas or complications. Try to make this sensation of thinking on the page feel as if it’s happening right now, vs. retroactively. And don’t refer in a “meta” way to the process of your research. In other words, ask a question like, “But is it always bad to include stereotypes in picture books?” rather than write, “When I started my research, I thought it was always bad to include stereotypes in picture books. But the more I started to think about it, the more I realized that sometimes it can, ironically, be helpful to include them.” Also avoid past-tense questions: “I wondered, is it always bad ...” The first, direct question is much better—full of energy and curiosity. Put readers inside your head as you grapple with interesting ideas and discover new insights right now, vs. giving readers an after-the-fact report of a research process.

Sometimes, given the circumstances, students will need to write more retroactively or with some “meta” moments, but they should try to preserve a sense of curiosity, exploration, and even wonder—that sense of meaning unfolding in real time. I ask students to limit “meta” commentaries because they can easily snap us out of their (and thus our) internal intellectual reverie. They can ruin the flow. Topic sentences, too, often kill suspense and stifle learning—students’ learning, that is, because they feel pressure to arrive at and announce a paragraph’s meaning upfront rather than explore their thoughts as they write. Also, the killjoy quality of topic sentences often, well, kills the joy or reading. As Elbow points out, “Consider the typical problem of textbooks: they are impressively well organized in all these signposting ways (along with the best graphics that money can buy). Yet they often put readers to sleep” (633).

Questions, on the other hand, (naturally) invite curiosity—for writers and readers alike.

5. Read exceptional essays

Yes, essays. Given our mission to teach academic writing, it’s easy to forget that excellent models of academic writing are hidden in plain sight—in publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New York Times Magazine. “But these aren’t scholarly!” you say? Fair enough, but especially at the dawn of an age when generative AI increasingly tempts students to yawn and prompt at the prospect of mimicking dry, formulaic, convention-obsessed writing with zero creativity, these professional essayists have much to teach us. If we use a little imagination, we can see how these essays published in non-scholarly but intellectual publications like The New Yorker can easily “transfer” to more academic contexts.

Consider, for example, Manvir Singh’s wonderful essay “The Post-Moral Age” published in the September 16, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. Singh guides readers through his journey from an idealistic young researcher inspired by signs of empathy in nature to a jaded scholar questioning whether even our most altruistic actions are ultimately driven by evolutionary selfishness. Singh’s essay is steeped in ambivalence. Partly because of this resonance with my PWR 1 course theme of ambivalence, and partly because I was so excited by the writing itself and its flow of introspection, I decided to share it with students. By “share,” I don’t just mean share a few interesting paragraphs. Nor do I mean assign it as homework to then briefly discuss in class with the (few?) students who had patiently read it. Instead, I brought in hard copies of the entire essay, and we read it aloud together—five volunteers to read the five pages.

The fact that I was sharing an essay that excited me personally in my informal reading life seemed to make an impression on students. I’m always enthusiastic about sharing good writing—mostly from previous students who have granted permission to use their work as models. But as we sat in Wallenberg 317 that day, with the sunlight streaming in as tourists streamed past the Oval, I did feel an extra jolt of energy. When the last volunteer finished reading the last paragraph, students discussed the essay, first in small groups. I loved how engaged they were. Some students even sounded transformed—by rhetorical possibilities that they hadn’t realized were available to them. Would a run-of-the-mill, professional-but-blah scholarly journal article have inspired them as much? No way. Singh’s essay may not have any in-text citations or a works cited, but it does reveal an impressive command of sources, from Nietzsche to Peter Singer. Besides, it’s easy to imagine a version of his essay with in-text citations and a works cited.

In his closing remarks for September Sessions 2015, Marvin said, “An RBA is a narrative.” He argued that “we don’t pay enough attention to the ‘showing’ aspect of RBAs.” After praising concrete detail, showing vs. telling, and evoking the senses, he said, “Do RBAs do that? Why the hell not?” Uh, sounds more like creative, exploratory essays from The New Yorker than bland scholarly journal articles. Of course, there are outstanding scholarly journal articles, but it’s a mistake to put that genre on a pedestal as the gold standard of academic writing, when it’s often the gold standard of mediocrity. What if, instead, we invite and challenge students to blend the rigor of traditional academic writing—such as the meticulous and ethical use of sources—with the exploratory energy and immersive voice and presence of professional essayists like Singh? As Sword notes in an outstanding 2013 talk at Harvard, “If we’re teaching students that being an academic is adhering to convention, we’re actually teaching them not to be in that top tier” of exceptional academic writers and thinkers.⁸ Do we really want to limit students’ potential and stifle their ambitions in this way?