In the following article, Bing Honors Director Sarah Pittock offers us a closer look at one way that students pursue intensive writing after PWR: through the English honors program.
In one quick, intense year, honors students in English must make a robust, original, and eloquent intervention in the field, arguing with “critical sophistication,” in Dr. Alice Staveley’s words. Joshua Ripple, for example, recently finished an interdisciplinary undergraduate thesis on J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes, focusing on what he saw as the interconnected problems of violence and the novel. Olivia Witting completed a thesis on Shakespeare’s Richard III, bringing disability studies to bear on the representations and lived experience of disfigurement in the English Renaissance.
Staveley, Director of Honors in the Department of English, aims for twenty percent of English majors to pursue honors and hopes that English Honors students will build “a lasting set of intellectual habits.” With such ambitious goals, how does English set honors students up for success? English chair, Professor Blakey Vermeule, asks her advisees to write before they feel ready. Her advice is institutionalized in a series of deadlines that students typically meet because in this major, they are part of a lively, collaborative, and supportive intellectual community.
They also start early. In their junior year, students are accepted into Honors in English based on letters of recommendation and advisor commitment. Thesis proposals are then due in early April and a prospectus in June. Sixty percent of English honors students also participate in Bing Honors College (BHC), a two week September writing intensive experience for rising seniors (see Dr. Staveley’s syllabus here). During BHC, honors students learn how to make writing a priority. They read sample theses, scholarship specific to their individual projects, and writing about writing, including pieces by Sheila Reindl, Mark Gaipa, Helen Sword, and Joan Bolker that share strategies for moving forward into a long, complex project with confidence, grace, and rhetorical awareness. The group also meets regularly with Dr. Staveley and her graduate assistant and enjoys lots of dedicated time to writing. At the end of BHC, they share some aspect of their work-in-progress with other honors students in art history and history at a humanities mini-conference. One student reported, “the conference format forced us all to consolidate and make our arguments effective for an audience that wouldn’t necessarily know precisely what we were talking about. I think preparing that helped push us all forward.”
During fall quarter of senior year, all Honors students take English 196A, a seminar dedicated to helping students produce work that is “entirely generated from and sustained by [their] own intellectual interests, imaginative faculties, and critical acumen,” as the syllabus puts it. On Wednesdays of every week, the class meets in the Hume Center to write together, building a habit of writing regularly in community. On Mondays, the seminar discusses student-curated scholarship, from theoretical feminist classics such as Helen Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” to more recent critical arguments such as Seo-Young Chu’s “Science Fiction and Postmemory Han in Contemporary Korean American Literature.” Each week a different set of students leads discussion, naming, describing, and interrogating what they find compelling about their chosen critic. Because the whole class reads everybody else’s critic, affinities across eras, genres, and themes can be observed. Perhaps more importantly, this exercise reveals the varied approaches to good criticism, the ways primary evidence can be introduced, theories leveraged, and arguments framed.
All are accountable to their progress. Dr. Staveley requires that students share their writing goals and achievements in a google doc. At the end of term, Dr. Staveley and the students’ advisors read preliminary work, at least 15 pages and usually a first chapter. Joshua says, “Alice Staveley’s fall seminar was deeply formative. . .. [The] course organization gave each student a small taste of a huge number of writing methodologies and approaches, a broad overview of the subject matter of each of their peers, and constant introductions to new thinkers, texts, and schematics for reading and analyzing works of literature. I found it incredibly helpful to hear what my peers were doing, how they planned on doing it, and what they were reading in the process.”
In winter, the department organizes very popular bi-weekly gatherings with wine and cheese. These events remind students of the community they built in the previous quarter and give faculty the chance to check in. By the end of winter quarter, students will have typically written forty pages, as the department requires them to turn in a second chapter to their advisors by March 15. By April 15, they then need to submit a full draft. One week after they turn in their final version (on May 7 in 2020), they participate in a colloquium, giving a 15-minute talk to a crowd in Margaret Jacks Hall. Parents skype in and people have even traveled to campus from around the world. It’s a “beautiful victory lap,” says Professor Vermeule.
Throughout this process, students are revising frequently and rigorously. Professor Vermeule assures her students “it’s not scary. Ninety percent of writing is revision. You don’t have to be brilliant the first hundred times.” Perhaps more importantly, she works to recast fixed mindsets; “your essence isn’t at stake,” she says. Writing a thesis is “a design problem,” a matter of crafting “a sentence or paragraph that works” for the particular point in the thesis. Vermeule passes along an analogy to her advisees: “If you’re given a task of making a perfect pot, do you spend six months trying to make a perfect pot or do you make 150 pots until you make the best one?” Olivia reports she learned to “find peace with throwing out work. No work is for naught; it helps you explore bigger ideas.” The thesis experience “built up her ability to produce more frequently and more often.”
In addition to an advisor, the English department assigns a graduate mentor to each student in the Honors Program. Graduate mentors are asked to meet twice a quarter with their mentee. Providing mentorship by someone who isn’t responsible for formal assessment yet who is also in the department has been “golden,” says Staveley. Olivia explains her mentor gave her both critical feedback and encouragement. In the face of uncertainty and doubt, he could assure her, “This happens to everyone. We all have imposter syndrome.” Joshua says the additional mentorship made a significant difference to his thesis, reporting that “it was lovely to get to spend time with a graduate student in the department, to hear about their work and to get advice from someone who, though advanced, was still a student.”
Graduate mentors are part of the team assessing each thesis writer’s work over the year. In addition to regular meetings with their advisors, students meet with Dr. Staveley, who provides feedback in the fall. And students are often connected with a Hume tutor for weekly meetings to support their productivity and revision goals. In May, the advisor writes a formal report and an outside reader also provides a second objective reading.
Joshua reports significant growth as a writer over the thesis year. His thesis engaged 20th-century sociocultural and political philosophy and contemporary anthropological theory in addition to recent literary criticism. Finishing his thesis showed him capable of writing “a coherent, compelling piece of academic writing that oscillated between such a range of fields.” He believes he will “carry this skill” “throughout the rest of [his] life in scholarship.” Come June of senior year, Olivia also found herself feeling grateful to have “finished a body of work and to be able to celebrate it with people who have been through the same thing and struggled to push through. It was a fantastic and surprising end to the college experience.” In addition to her sense of belonging within an intellectual community, Olivia found the thesis experience confirmed the “redemptive nature of completion.”
Since Dr. Staveley became Director of Honors in English seven years ago, students have won four Kennedy awards, among others. Their success and the program’s very high completion rate can be credited to the students’ dedication to their writing and to the department’s dedication to them. Dr. Staveley also points to a number of important adjustments to the program over the past few years. Students are now strongly encouraged to take a writing-intensive seminar soon after declaring. Learning fundamental disciplinary writing skills early in their careers as English majors has better prepared students for Honors, Staveley believes. More thesis writers also apply for a Major grant in March of their junior year, which means they get started sooner. And they now write a prospectus at the end of junior year, returning to their proposals to “expose the soft spots,” “winnowing” and “sharpening” their approach to the material says Staveley. This early revision requires a lot of honesty and prepares students for an intellectual strategy they will need throughout the coming year.
For Professor Vermeule, advising thesis writers is at the core of her purpose as a professor: mentoring the next generation of scholars. For Dr. Staveley, advising thesis writers is both her vocation and an intellectual challenge. She debates how best to guide students jumping through a hoop of their own making. She observes, “Honors renders a real change in students. It alters their way of thinking about themselves because it touches what real scholarship is. Students get a sense for why professors choose to be professors. Becoming cognizant of hard, intellectual work is vastly rewarding.” She concludes, “those who appreciate the process and the opportunity of the thesis year get the most out of elite education.”
