Harvard’s Dearth of Writing Feedback

This summer, the two writers of this piece travelled to a national security fellowship and to the University of Oxford, respectively, and we encountered the extinct: rigorous and honest feedback on academic writing, as well as the chance to implement it.

Too often at Harvard, we submit essays into a Canvas void, which outputs a singular letter grade and, if we’re lucky, limited feedback on the argument’s coherence. Notably absent are stylistic comments on word choice, sentence structure, clarity of language, or flow of argumentation. Worse still, we lack the opportunity to discuss and implement changes within the course.

Education is a fundamentally collaborative process, and an opportunity to learn is lost every time an essay is produced alone on Lamont’s third floor before never being thought of again. Writing should be more than just a means to test understanding — it is the basic building block of a strong humanistic education.

But we also recognize that bandwidth for instructors is an unavoidable issue when advocating for intensive writing feedback, especially in larger courses (and also given how poorly our graduate students are compensated). Thus, we propose an overhaul of Harvard College’s writing model: incorporate in-person peer review into every paper that is submitted for evaluation.

Growth as a writer comes when errors in argument and distracting idiosyncrasies are identified, assessed, and remedied. Like all skills, writing requires reinforcement of good habits and the diminishment of bad ones. But given the thousands of judgment calls that span an essay, a single grade simply provides too little information about what went right or wrong.

Sharing one’s writing reveals new possible arguments and objections that may be lurking in the background of any given piece. Without outside examination, anyone’s claims are limited to the subjective visions that each of us possess individually, leaving on the table both a superior finished product and the benefits of the process of bringing it there.

A system of in-person peer feedback benefits the reviewer, too. When criticizing the work of a peer, students must evaluate what aspects of writing they find persuasive and which ones they do not. It is much easier to determine what styles one finds lacking when reading someone else’s work rather than one’s own, and these observations can be folded back in turn into one’s own writing.

Importantly, the value of feedback is not limited to the structure of broader arguments. One of the aspects of our experiences this summer that made them so powerful was that we were accountable for every word and phrase that we produced. Tone, word choice, and syntax are all crucial aspects of strong writing, but on these fronts especially we have found Harvard’s feedback system lacking. While providers of feedback may feel that such criticisms only amount to nitpicks, linguistic imprecisions accumulate and can drown out what otherwise may be strong writing.

Another advantage of in-person editing is that students would have to be answerable for what they have (or, perhaps, have not) written if they must explain their choices and encapsulate their argument. While certainly not a catch-all solution, being accountable to a peer on an essay is a way to encourage both deeper academic engagement and possibly disincentivize the use of AI to write one’s work.

Little is lost by dedicating a couple of sections or mere hours of a seminar’s discussion time to editing every semester. If the writing workshop were implemented before the essay’s due date, students would be forced to produce multiple drafts of a paper and thus internalize revision as a habit of writing.

Some students, like in any academic pursuit, will be more invested than others, and quality of feedback might be uneven. Regrettable as this may be, given the demands already placed on our instructors, this system is the most feasible choice we have that can still pay dividends. Routine, meaningful feedback will require strong norms of rigor and engagement that we hope can be built over time, but this is not possible if the process is not set in motion.

Although we love our jobs writing and editing for The Crimson, we both find it regrettable that it is this extracurricular activity that has provided us with our most substantial English language training at Harvard.

Clear communication skills are more important than ever, and students should not have to look outside the classroom to build them.

Amelia F. Barnum ’28, an Associate Editorial Editor, is a Philosophy concentrator in Winthrop House. Adam N. Chiocco ’27, an Associate Editorial Editor, is a Philosophy concentrator in Pforzheimer House.