Yesterday, I had the great honor, to participate in a BUSPH Public Health Conversation panel discussion called Teaching Public Health: Writing and Communication. The full recording will be available here in the next couple days.
My main message was that public health professors need to set aside their expectation that students arrive in their classes already knowing how to write public health documents tailored to specific audiences. This is particularly true in graduate programs. Writing is not a competency once mastered and easily reproduced. Rather it is a process and a practice that we engage in over the course of our lives.
The clarity of our writing is often an indicator of what’s going on in the rest of our lives. And it can sometimes fall apart as we learn new information, perspectives, and terminology. Here’s the story I told about my own writing journey.
When I was an undergraduate English major, I clearly remember the feeling of having lost control of my writing. I had so many words and ideas, but for the life of me I could no longer remember how to construct a sentence or use a comma. This happened sometime around my junior year. Before that, in high school and my first couple years of college, the writing had come fairly easily, and I’ll admit that I didn’t try very hard. But my papers were generally satisfactory, if not brilliant.
Then a couple of things happened. I started getting excited by the Elizabeth Gaskell novels I was reading about industrialized Victorian England. I was inspired by several professors (really inspired for the first time) to peer into the past and the present through those teeming fictional worlds. And every time I sat down to write, my ideas, words, and sentences started colliding into one another, splintering off in new directions, reaching beyond what I was easily able to articulate.
I’m sure those papers were extremely challenging for my professors to read. I’m grateful that they were patient, generous readers. They apparently saw the ideas, gave me the benefit of the doubt, and mentored me through the process of regaining my ability to write a coherent sentence with more or less correct punctuation as I worked through the jumble of ideas in my head.
The process was slow and awkward, but I eventually got back on track. I started my masters degree in English literature and eventually completed my PhD. I taught freshman composition throughout graduate school. I learned about the writing process, about writing as a form of learning, and the connection between writing and cognitive development and language acquisition. I was able to look back at my sentence structure meltdown and see it in a new light. My abstract thinking had outpaced my ability to clearly formulate thoughts and information on the page. But with time and practice and patient professors, I caught up.
Then I decided to enroll in an MPH program, and it happened all over again. This time, I wasn’t floundering at the sentence level. Instead, I was bogged down in a sea of technical language and numbers, writing documents I had never heard of before. Hello policy brief and research memo. This time the emotional stakes were higher. I had a PhD in English for goodness sake. I had been a writing teacher and an editor.
And now I was writing papers about HIV in Ghana and forgetting (or maybe not even realizing) that I needed to mention that 2% of the adult population is HIV positive. It could have been demoralizing. But, again, patient professors and my previous experience helped me feel optimistic that with enough time to think, draft, revise, get feedback, and revise again, I would figure out how to write a satisfactory policy brief and literature review.
Most of our students are on similar journeys. And the same is true for us, their professors. Many of us spend our lives sliding back and forth on an emotional continuum of writing confidence and panic. The life-course approach helps us re-imagine our relationship with our writing as we build our knowledge, learn new skills, accumulate experience and feedback, and develop our sense of identity as a writer.