Succeeding at college demands more than mastering a single role. College students must be quick-change artists.

In one semester a typical undergraduate might be called upon to take on the persona of a classicist, a historian, a literary critic, and a musicologist, and in the next semester a biologist, statistician, philosopher, and political scientist.

Moreover, students who fail to master one of these roles -- who, say, hand in a philosophy paper that does not convincingly embody that discipline's intellectual perspective, its use of language, and its unique mode of posing questions, can be penalized with a bad grade.

Until recently, Harvard students trying to master diverse modes of academic writing often did so alone. The difficulty such multiple role-playing presented was scarcely recognized.

That situation began to change in 1994 with the publication of a study of undergraduate writing at Harvard commissioned by President Neil L. Rudenstine and researched and written by Nancy Sommers, Sosland Director of Expository Writing.

The report, based on interviews with 30 faculty members, 25 teaching fellows, and 123 undergraduates, described an intellectual isolation around the subject of writing.

"That isolation," the report stated, "is reinforced and perpetuated by the lack of clear writing guidelines from discipline to discipline. Students, for example, testify to a trial and error pattern of learning. Without clearly articulated expectations for assignments, learning how to write within a given discipline is often achieved only by default."

The report has since served as both a pilot study and a mission statement for an ongoing effort to change the way writing is taught at Harvard. That initiative, known as the Harvard Writing Project, has involved the collaboration of numerous faculty members who share Sommers' goals.

"As many Harvard faculty have realized, writing is part of the very fabric of learning -- in nearly every academic field," Sommers said. "The purpose of the Harvard Writing Project is to extend intensive writing instruction beyond the freshman year by helping faculty and teaching fellows throughout the College develop effective ways of assigning and responding to student writing."

In its first three years, the Harvard Writing Project has already set up a number of programs. Writing Project consultants have worked with seven Core courses and two sophomore tutorials, advising faculty members on the design of writing assignments and helping to train teaching fellows (TFs) to respond effectively to student writing. The Writing Project has also published course-specific writing guides, produced a widely used booklet called Writing with Sources, sponsored faculty lectures on the craft of scholarly writing, and placed four academic writing tutors in residential houses. The Project even has its own newsletter, the Harvard Writing Project Bulletin, which comes out each fall.

After publishing her report, Sommers began working with faculty members, many of whom had already come to similar conclusions about the place of writing in the teaching process. Patrick Ford, the Margaret Brooks Robinson Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures, was one of Sommers' earliest and most enthusiastic collaborators. He had been forced to rethink his ideas about writing years before when he was acting director of the writing program at UCLA. That experience made him realize that "writing is a fundamental part of any intellectual process" and that "we don't know what we think until we write."

Now in his Core course, Poets and Poetry in the Celtic Literary Tradition, Ford assigns six one-page ungraded essays designed to teach the art of close reading and prepare students to write longer mid-term and final papers. Ford gets together with his teaching assistants at the beginning of the term for a daylong workshop on how best to help undergraduates develop their reading and writing skills.

Other faculty members have followed a similar strategy in reorganizing their courses. In his Core course, Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Architecture, Neil Levine, the Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Fine Arts, decided to change the writing requirement from a single final research paper to a series of exercises and short essays, some graded and some ungraded, designed to accustom students to using the precise language of architectural studies.

These assignments gave students practice in describing visual evidence and using it to bolster their arguments. For TFs, the process of rethinking the writing goals of the course has proved enlightening as well. Said TF Karen Eisenlonis: "I have never taught before for a course where we thought about the reasons for writing papers. The discussions proved helpful in evaluating and giving students feedback."

Gregory Nagy, the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and professor of comparative literature, was one of the first faculty members to respond to Sommers' call for greater faculty involvement in the teaching of writing.

Beginning in the fall of 1995, in Nagy's Core course, The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization, he began presenting students with a series of assignments designed "to lead the student step-by-step, in sequence, into the skills of textual exegesis." The following year, Nagy added a booklet called A Handbook for Heroes Writers by Head Teaching Fellow Thomas Jenkins and David Gewanter, former head preceptor in expository writing. The booklet gives students clear instructions on how to approach and complete the kinds of assignments that Heroes now requires.

"These assignments are important," said Nagy, "since the goal is to introduce the student not only to the world of classical literature but also to past and present research in the study of this literature. It is vital for the student to become familiar with some of the major methods and styles of scholarly communication in the field."

Sommers hopes that a series of guides to be used in sophomore tutorials will help students newly embarked on their fields of concentration learn the language of their chosen academic discipline. The guides will explain how scholars in the field formulate questions and how their writing reflects their specialized viewpoint.

The first of these guides, Writing History, by William Storey, a historian who is currently a preceptor in expository writing, appeared last fall. A second guide by Storey, on writing in the history of science, will appear early this fall, and more guides to writing in specific concentrations -- economics and classics, among others -- are in the works.

In Writing History, Storey offers students a simple, straightforward initiation into the historian's perspective, from understanding the differences between primary and secondary sources, to detecting and interpreting biases in source material, to constructing a clear and compelling narrative.

"On the surface history may seem straightforward, but the process of writing is filled with difficult decisions," Storey observes. "Sometimes our sources lead us to obvious conclusions; other times writing history, even with the best sources and methods, can be like trying to nail jelly to the wall."

One finding of the 1994 study was that students want to know more about how professors approach writing in their scholarly work. To help satisfy this need, Sommers has been instrumental in creating the Gordon Gray Faculty Lectures on the Craft of Scholarly Writing. The lectures are delivered once a semester and have proved very popular, drawing crowds of more than 250 graduate and undergraduate students. The lecture series provides distinguished Harvard scholars with a forum for sharing their writing experiences with an eager and receptive audience.

The first lecturer, History Professor Mark Kishlansky, evoked knowing laughs when he revealed his early struggles to put his findings in clear prose (a professor told him that reading one of his papers was "like trying to put scrambled eggs back into their respective shells," and a reviewer of his first book wrote that "no one who enjoys the English language will actually like reading this book").

Subsequent lectures have been equally enlightening and entertaining. Nobel Prize-winner Dudley Herschbach, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science, delivered a lecture titled "Brewing and Mixing: Writing as a Chemist." Herschbach spoke about the similarity between doing science and writing poetry. Both, he said, are about discovering a new perspective. Accordingly, Herschbach challenges students in his introductory class to write poems about the principles of chemistry, an assignment that has produced some very interesting results.

In his fall 1996 lecture, "The Scholarly Essay: Writing as a Philosopher," Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of Afro-American studies and of philosophy, considered how a scholar writing for an educated public can use professional knowledge but not a specialized, professional language. He used examples from his own work, including an essay on culture and identity that focused on his father's funeral, and an essay for the New York Review of Books on gay marriage.

The fall 1997 Gordon Gray lecture will be delivered by Theda Skocpol, professor of government and of sociology. The spring 1998 lecturer will be Mary Gaylord, Professor of Romance languages and literatures.

Another feature of the Harvard Writing Project has been to place expository writing faculty in residential Houses as writing tutors. Kerry Walk, the Writing Project's first residential tutor, is an expository writing preceptor who has been helping at least 50 students per semester. A Tutor in Academic Writing at Dunster House, she has read papers, long and short, in nearly every discipline. "I work with students on their papers at any point in the writing process, from the blank page to the polished draft," she said.

Last year Walk trained 13 other House tutors with expertise in a range of fields (including science) to work with students on their writing. Members of the Dunster Writing Bloc, as this group is called, respond constructively to drafts and help students interpret writing assignments and focus their ideas. They also help students grasp the conventions of writing in the different disciplines.

Beginning this month, Sommers will follow up on her 1994 findings by launching a longitudinal study of undergraduate writing funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Sommers will follow 10 percent of the Class of 2001 through all four years at Harvard. She will collect all their writings and interview a small sub-group each semester in an attempt to draw a portrait of the undergraduate writing experience.

"I want to understand not only the general role writing plays in the lives of undergraduates, and the varieties of writing experiences that students have in a Harvard career, but also the specific defining moments in students' writing lives -- those courses, instructors, and experiences which have most influenced these Harvard undergraduates," Sommers said. "At the end of four years, we will have gathered the richest and most complex data ever collected on the role of writing in undergraduate education."

Skocpol's Gordon Gray lecture will take place at 4 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 22, in Boylston Auditorium.

-- By Ken Gewertz with research by Lama Jarudi