For many professors, the hardest courses to teach are at the introductory level. You are faced with a mass of material to cover and a roomful of students who are required to be there and aren’t (yet) convinced they are interested in your subject.
All it takes to change their outlook is a compelling teacher. As a Yale undergraduate, I recall sitting in a filled-to-capacity, 500-seat auditorium to take the late Vincent Scully’s “Introduction to the History of Art,” and later, his “Introduction to the History of Architecture.” A few times a week, just before lunch, the lights would go down, and we would sit riveted for 50 minutes.
What made Scully such a popular and effective teacher?
Tall, movie-star handsome, preppily dressed, he never spoke from notes. Nor did he expect us to take them. He was a performer, both larger than life and wholly human, commanding attention and making small mistakes. When the slides didn’t change quickly enough, he rapped the floor with an impatient stick. Instead of asking us to memorize dates or names, he taught us how to look. He made associations and brought in mythology, literature, current events. He tapped into our emotions by using the second person: “You get the feeling you’re climbing uphill.” He described images in accessible language. He moved around the stage, so caught up in his subject that your eye couldn’t help following him.
Given all the moves and tricks Scully used to compel hungover students to rapt attention, you’d think he would have been able to transfer that impressive skill set to his writing for general audiences. One of the assigned textbooks for his intro architecture course was Scully’s own book, The Earth, The Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture. I don’t remember much about reading it, but glancing at it now, I see that his virtuoso lecturing did not, in fact, translate to lively writing.
There’s an unintentionally hilarious moment when he writes about “Doxiadis’s theory of Greek temenos planning.” Scully includes an excerpt — presumably from this Doxiadis person, who is unidentified on the page (he’s a 20th-century Greek architect) — and prefaces it with, “As he rather beautifully puts it.” Scully then produces a block of text. In untranslated German.
The book, the professor’s fourth, was published in 1962. By the time I struggled through it 20 years later, Scully had a lot of teaching under his J. Press belt. But the author of that book and the man on the stage seemed entirely different beings.
I relay all of this now not to bury Scully for adhering to tics of academic writing, but to praise him for his electrifying lecture style. Onstage, he never made students feel stupid for not knowing. But I suspect it was his own insecurity that came out when he wrote. A New Haven townie, he said in interviews he felt like he never quite fit in at Yale. On the page you can see him striving to prove his mettle as a member of the club.
He’s just one example of a familiar phenomenon: excellent, popular lecturers and public speakers in academe who aren’t able to translate their prodigious explanatory powers to the page. Something about the academic world discourages the kind of passion in writing that the best educators bring to the classroom.
As writers, academics are supposed to be detached, rigorous, serious when we publish. We’re supposed to keep things complicated. Social media has changed that somewhat, and plenty of us have learned to express ourselves more openly and personally in public. Yet too many faculty members still seem to believe they can’t bring their whole selves to the page — the silly, the funny, the erudite, the low-brow; the references to both “The Bacchae” and “The Bachelorette.”
Thing is, many of the moves that the best lecturers make on the stage can translate to the page and help you draw in readers. That is especially important in writing textbooks and other work for general readers. If you can bring the parts of yourself that work in the classroom to the prose, you will delight readers as much as you do your students.
Narrative can be key. Data and research aren’t enough in either the classroom or on the page. People like to be told stories. If you want to be persuasive in both realms, use narrative to make arguments. Don’t forget that much scholarly work is really a quest. What journey can you take a reader on?
Share the excitement of discovery, not just the results. Tell a story from the beginning and present readers with characters they will care about. Don’t forget that you, the writer, are also a character. It’s a lot easier to connect to an “I” than it is to a pile of data. Just make sure that it’s clear how the story you’re telling relates to the information you want to convey.
It’s a performance on the page, too. A great lecture is a performance. So is great writing. In teaching, you want to engage not just those in the front row, but those in the back of the room, baseball caps pulled low. You’re conveying information, sure, but you’re also trying to impress an audience. You want their attention on you, not on their phones or on their friends a few seats over.
You’ve done this in the classroom. Now think about the books that you can’t put down, even when the dog is begging to go for a walk. That is what you’re going for on the page.
Be human. Write as you speak in the classroom — like a person, not a bot (although at this point, ChatGPT can create prose that sounds more human than many professors).
What does that mean in practice? Just as you do in your teaching to connect with students, make small confessions in your writing. Use examples that are specific to you (say, a preference for Cheez-Its), and a conversational style. All of those can make a reader feel connected to the prose and more likely to absorb information.
Don’t be afraid of slogans, jingles, and earworms. A computer-scientist friend once told me something incredibly useful. “I teach in slogans,” he said. If you use sticky phrases, they stay with people.
Most of us need to hear things a number of times before we really get it. Readers like handy lines to remind them of more complex arguments.
I know I’m successful in class when students repeat my own words back to me as if they’d just come up with these ideas themselves. I’ve called this “unintentional plagiarism,” and I try to take it as a win. Once you’ve fully explained a difficult concept, it helps to have a phrase as a reminder. Many best-selling authors are ingenious at this. (Malcolm Gladwell may be the king of the sticky phrase.)
Use analogies and personification. Taking in massive amounts of new information can be exhausting. Listeners and readers like to be rewarded with recognition. Just as you might do in a lecture, you can use snappy phrasing on the page to describe the neediness of atoms looking to fill their electron shells. Are negative ions like middle-school girls who can’t stand not to be in the group? Are noble gases the loners content to sit by themselves and read? Do sodium and chloride go together like chocolate and peanut butter (OK, I’m not a chemist but you get the idea). Using a wide range of references can foster understanding — and delight readers.
Raise real questions the reader will want answers to. In a seminar, if you ask a question — a real one — you can see students thinking. If you’re patient, you learn to wait to allow someone to venture an answer before you fork it over. (Unless you’re asking them to read your mind, a mistake I still often make.)
On the page, you can raise a question, but you must assure the reader you will provide an answer before they go off on their own to ponder it. Promise that if they follow you, the view will be worth the climb. And then, of course, you have to make that so. Along the way, it’s useful to remind them what the question is.
Details are your Goldilocks grist — not too much, not too little, just right. Think about the notes that your students take in class. They’re looking for big ideas and they learn what they don’t have to transcribe. They are on the alert for the “takeaways.” They shop for value.
Likewise, general readers will be put off by long Latin names of species or compounds that aren’t worth further elaboration. Often specifics important to specialists are not essential to the main points. At the same time, all good writing is vivid and specific. As you probably do in class, make sure you emphasize important points and don’t bury them in a mass of details and the kind of hedging and qualifying that academics often rely on.
Find smart — but ignorant on your subject — readers who will tell you the truth. When you’ve spent a long time learning difficult concepts and metabolized them into your being, it can be hard to make them clear to people whose diet has consisted of entirely different staples. It’s easier to rely on shorthand, jargon, and coded language than to strive for clarity.
When you lecture, you can see the nodding heads furiously taking notes, and the confused, struggling, or bored students who aren’t. You get real and immediate feedback.
You can get that kind of critique for your writing by finding readers who are confident enough to say what they don’t understand. Look for people far outside your field, including smart undergraduates and high-school students. Give them specifics to read for: What surprised you? What did you find most interesting? Where were you confused? What bored you? Encourage them to be honest and tell you the parts they skimmed. Then revise.
You’re teaching because you are (or once were) excited about your field. Bring that passion to the page. Keep things clear, though not necessarily simple. Remember the energy that comes from discovery. Pull on your vast stores of knowledge and culture (both high and, if you go that way, low). It’s a chestnut, but well worth repeating: E.M. Forster’s urging to “only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted.”
