Writing Can’t Be Learned by Watching

Did you come to Harvard to watch “Grey’s Anatomy?”

In the 2025-26 academic year, over 50 sections of Harvard’s hallmark freshman writing program, Expository Writing 20, have included movies or television as part of their syllabi. Some classes merely include a one-off watch-this-documentary assignment in an already text-heavy, rigorous curriculum. But others use films as major works, dedicating entire units to the medium.

The tendency spans diverse topics: “Do No Harm? Healthcare’s Limits” asks students to watch an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Breaking the Norm” assigns four full-length movies, and “Representing Royalty” spends much of its first week on an episode of “The Crown.”

Harvard professes that its philosophy for Expos 20 is “good thinking requires good writing.” But good writing requires good reading, not just good media consumption. Expos syllabi that substitute visual media for sustained engagement with written language undermine the writing program’s pedagogical purpose.

The framers of Expos 20 are correct that “writing and thinking are inseparably related.” But the goal of a writing program is not just to teach critical thinking or rigorous analysis. It is to teach written expression, specifically. This means specific attention must be given to the language, diction, syntax, and structure of texts.

While films have common elements with texts — you can learn about narrative from watching “The Godfather” and masterful dialogue from “12 Angry Men” — in a writing program like Expos 20, students should first be reading other people’s writing to learn how to do it themselves.

Famous directors like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino consume cinema religiously to improve their craft, and the best writers do the same. Joan Didion famously retyped Ernest Hemingway to “learn how the sentences worked.” Copious exposure, indeed, immersion in a medium is the best way to improve one’s own work.

This is not to say that film analysis should never be taught or isn’t an art form — it should be and is: Harvard offers courses on film through the Art, Film, and Visual Studies department. If Expos 20 is truly a writing program, it should concern itself only with the written word.

One of the reasons preceptors presumably include visual media is to engage a new generation of students. Members of Gen Z are thought to be digital natives more than they are voracious readers. But not every text-based class should focus on classics. Read contemporary fiction, journalism, poetry, young adult novels — anything that uses the written word.

We live in a world moving away from print media. Subscriptions to physical magazines are plummeting, professors at Ivy League colleges reportedly have trouble getting students to read full books, and in September, median reading scores for twelfth graders nationwide had fallen to their lowest since 1992.

There’s no escaping the conclusion that we are transitioning to an era of media marked by online information and content. At Harvard, this change is easy to see: The Crimson has ceased its daily print publication and a survey of Harvard undergraduates found that, for about one quarter of respondents, generative artificial intelligence has begun to replace attending office hours and completing readings. Short and long-form video content may very well be the essay and novel of the future.

It’s tempting to say that Harvard, the institution of higher education purportedly educating America’s next generation of leaders, should acclimate them as soon as possible to this new age. But the inclusion of films as major parts of Expos 20 syllabi risks a gradual dilution of the program’s expressed mission in a digitizing landscape like ours.

To be fair to the preceptors, Expos 20, at large, is still very textual. In most classes, films are paired with texts, and not the other way around. Expos 20 is still trying to make students better writers by making them better readers. But that could change. The novel and essay very well could be (at least popularly) replaced by information-oriented visual media in the next century. This should worry us.

In an increasingly technological world, the text must be protected, if not for itself, then with an eye toward the world to come. The purpose of a writing program is not analysis or critical thinking, skills ever more in demand. It is to teach students to write well, and thus to busy oneself with the written word — a sacred and jeopardized project.

Isabel C. Hogben ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Greenough Hall.