Writing Support

The Bok Center has partnered with the Harvard College Writing Program on the production of a family of web-based resources designed to render the process of assigning, completing, and grading writing assignments more transparent.

• HarvardWrites aims to bridge the gap between Harvard's Expository Writing courses for first-year students ("Expos"), which focus on equipping students with a shared language around generally-applicable principles of argumentation, evidence, and structure in academic writing, and the kinds of disciplinary writing that students will do within their concentrations. While students can use the resources on HarvardWrites to refresh their memory of the principles of effective academic writing, instructors can use the site to learn the common language which students should know upon completing Expos, so that they can design disciplinary writing assignments (and calibrate their feedback on them) to connect with what students already know.
• GovWrites and AnthroWrites, the first of what we hope will be many discipline-based sites, aim to convene a shared conversation among students and faculty around the disciplinary conventions of their respective fields. What are the common modes in which political scientists or cultural anthropologists write? What are the "moves" that archaeologists or political theorists perform to render objects or texts into evidence for a claim? How do writers in these fields acknowledge their relationship to their predecessors, intervene in field-specific debates, and cite their sources?

The Bok Center is happy to connect departments interested in developing their own entry in the Writes franchise with the Writing Program.