The Case for a Freshmen Essay Repository

Harvard freshmen write a lot. They should be able to read each other’s work.

All undergraduates are required to satisfy the College’s expository writing requirement in their first year. This requirement elevates students’ analytical process to the college level, and freshmen leave having produced work that reflects that. Students then move on to other courses, to other papers, to other peers.

This progression, however, does not fully capture just how special, nor critical, the process of first-year writing is. The writing requirement is the only requirement at the College that, for more than 150 years, all students must complete. All at once, universally, Harvard’s newest generation undergoes the process of formulating for themselves the basis, the understanding, of what it means to think collegiately.

Of course, students will ideally engage with authoritative voices in their readings for these courses. Yet, the freshman writing journey also demands cross-pollination. Freshmen ought to be engaging with each other’s writing en masse, ought to be sharpening and complicating their own sense of college-level thinking through the dynamic novelty of their peers’ ideas.

That peer reviews of essay drafts are a hallmark of Humanities 10, for example, is a testament to this position, but they are not enough. An internal, digital repository for Expository Writing and Hum 10 essays would allow students to build confidence to share their scholarship with others while facilitating the kind of mutual engagement essential to the intended intellectual growth of the College’s writing program.

The repository would be managed by the College, be year-specific, and organized by course. When students submitted an essay, they could indicate whether they wanted their essay included in the repository. The student’s name would be optionally attached, but not the grade. At the end of the academic year, the repository would be cleared, having provided freshmen with the opportunity to read their immediate peers’ work, publish their own, and reap the rewards of that exchange.

This sort of interaction already exists in one way or another. There are plenty of undergraduate student organizations that publish student work — Tempus, the undergraduate journal of history; The Advocate, one of the College’s literary magazines; Zeitgeist, the Harvard Review of Philosophy’s magazine, to name a few. These avenues can be valuable for students who want their work out in the world, and their prolificacy importantly suggests students’ desire to read and consider each other’s scholarship.

Still, they often contain too high a barrier to entry. The process for publishing is not only not guaranteed, but can be demanding as well as intimidating, given the potential for rejection from peer editors. Additionally, many of these student publications are thematically driven, limiting what students can submit.

These barriers are natural and vital to any publication — printing just anything risks credibility. However, the repository is not an alternative to these organizations because, while capitalizing on students’ interest in each other’s work, it serves a distinct purpose: It is fundamentally a means by which students can showcase writing of which they are individually proud.

As such, the repository would be a much more discretionary experience: It makes no editorial claims on the value of the work therein beyond what the writer, who has elected to include his work, and his readers determine for themselves. It would be more akin to a walk through an art fair than through a museum.

The present alternative to this repository, beyond extant student publications, is individual solicitation. This process of asking to read others’ papers and sending your own, however, can be just as awkward and daunting for students as a more formal publication. It is also incredibly time-consuming, and it limits one to the people he knows rather than the paper topics that interest him. The repository streamlines the propensity many Harvard students have to mutually engage, and it democratizes it, empowering anyone to easily put their essays out into the world of their peers, to be reviewed and learned from.

The expository writing requirement marks a significant, precious moment in the undergraduate lifespan. Yet, the rush to introduce freshmen to a vast array of external and authoritative literary influences risks losing sight of one of the most valuable resources they have: one another’s work. The repository model makes good on this asset; it brings the sum of first-year writing into full view.

Jackson H. Barr ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Canaday Hall.