Writing Tips & Tricks from Pitzer Professors

Many of us first encounter writing as a set of rules: 

• Don’t use the word “I.” 
• Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. 
• Don’t stray from the format of the five-paragraph essay.

But writing in college is less about rules and more about a complex array of choices made within social contexts: 

• Who is my audience? 
• What is my purpose? 
• Which perspectives are missing from the discussion? 
• And what are the consequences of those omissions?

In short, at Pitzer you’ll use your writing to enter consequential conversations, asking questions with no easy answers and exploring many viewpoints in order to arrive at your own. Writing at Pitzer is transformative. It’s a form of world-making that enables you to envision and help create a more informed, socially just world.

We’ve curated short videos showcasing the voices of roughly two dozen Pitzer faculty across the curriculum, from psychology to environmental analysis, archeology to biology. They share their tips and tricks for writing, including the ways their fields of study influence how they approach writing and what they would tell their college-aged selves if they could go back in time.

We hope you’ll find these virtual conversations informative and exciting for the wide-ranging perspectives they offer on writing as the life-long pursuit of knowledge and its ethical implications.

Watch the Playlist