How Creative Writing Tutoring Informs Grad School Essay Tutoring

When I was working at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I tutored a Fulbright exchange PhD student on their dissertation which had an interdisciplinary topic across neurobiology, chemistry, and machine learning. Because the topic spanned three academic fields, the student had the challenge of having to write to specialists and generalists at the same time—i.e., the student had to write in sufficient technical detail to interest the specialists, but also had the challenge of making the specialist technical language intelligible to the academics from the other fields. On top of this already incredibly difficult task, the student wanted the dissertation to be intelligible to non-academics as well. I therefore suggested that we look at some popular scientific non-fiction to accomplish this task.

To figure out how to write this way, we took as an example the international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. Here is the first sentence of that book, “About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang.” This first sentence is well written for a generalist audience because it first describes the first important technical term, “the Big Bang,” before actually naming it. If the reader is not familiar with the Big Bang theory, naming that theory at the start does not help the reader understand what it is. Instead, Harari describes the technical term in language the general reader can understand, and then tells the reader what the technical name for it is.

To further assist the generalist reader, Harari repeats this same sentence structure throughout the introduction. The introduction continues, “The story of these fundamental features [matter, energy, time and space] of our universe is called physics. About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry” (my emphasis.) By repeating this structure, the reader gets used to the pattern and understands that they will be provided a definition followed by the technical term. I suggested my student replicate this structure in their dissertation which would help her readers understand the underlying concepts before being supplied with the technical term.

Harari’s writing not only repeats a helpful structure, but it also does something else that good (academic) writing does too, which is reusing the same words near each other while increasing the complexity of the concepts. Here is the first two paragraphs of the introduction:

“About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics.

About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry” (my emphasis).

Here Harari introduces basic concepts “matter” and “energy,” then explains how they make up “atoms” which in turn make up “molecules” which all combined make up the study of chemistry. The words “matter” and “energy” are repeated to provide continuity and, instead of dropping out of the picture altogether, they are what make up the broader concepts described later. Harari does the same thing with “atoms” and “molecules” as well.

            Another way to put it is that good (academic) writing points both forward and backward at the same time. This feature is often what is referred to as “flow” as each sentence relates to the ones that come before and after. For example, if you look at the second sentence of the introduction, “these fundamental features” refers to “matter” and “energy” in the first sentence, and also “matter and energy” that appears in the third sentence. These sentences also exhibit the delicate balance of not repeating the same words over-and-over right next to each other by occasionally using pronouns to provide some variety.

            As a final note, you’ll also notice that in addition to repeated sentence structures, these two paragraphs also feature a repeated structure by starting with measures of time and ending with a branch of science (physics and chemistry, respectively.) These repeated structures at the word, sentence, and paragraph level all work together to allow the reader to be able to anticipate what kinds of information will appear where and how to organize the information they are receiving. These simple repeated structures help the reader learn complex material. You can continue to see them used in the following two paragraphs of the introduction:

“About 3.8 billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology.

About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.”

My student replicated these simple features in the introduction of her dissertation to prepare her readers to understand very complex and specialized topics across broad areas of knowledge.