Krystlove Yeboah ’27 thought of herself as a decent writer coming into her first year at Cornell, even though English isn’t her first language. After all, she gained admission into the Ivy League and into a school that boasted alumni and faculty luminaries such as Toni Morrison and E.B. White.
But quickly her freshman writing seminars and government classes revealed that her high school writing skills needed an upgrade. So Yeboah became a frequent visitor to the Cornell Writing Center located in Uris Library.
“I knew I wanted to go into majors with heavy writing and research, and working on my papers with a tutor offered an outside perspective that helped me learn what questions to ask and how to approach a paper,” she said. “I learned strategies for how to make my writing clearer and more succinct. The tutors gave me the confidence to say now I’m a good writer.”
Such confidence, in fact, that Yeboah is taking the training course this spring to become a tutor herself in the fall.
“I want to be able to help people and demystify what it takes to be a good writer,” said Yeboah, a government major in the College of Arts & Sciences. “By asking writers questions about their work, they can notice the weaknesses and add to their papers to fully defend their viewpoints or theses.”
Yeboah is one of many Cornell students who take advantage of the Cornell Writing Centers, Graduate Writing Service and writing workshops, three of the offerings of the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, which also coordinates first-year writing (FWS) seminars, the writing in the majors program and provides writing support across campus through its outreach efforts.
While the writing centers remain in Rockefeller Hall, in the libraries and on North Campus, the Knight Institute’s main office recently moved into a newly-renovated space in Stimson Hall, also home to the Language Resource Center and the Office of Undergraduate Biology.
Expanding writing across campus classrooms
The Knight Institute traces its beginning to 1966 when Cornell expanded its first-year writing program from just one department – English — into eight others. By 1975, the writing program had grown to 50 courses in 17 departments. Today, more than 35 departments and programs offer courses associated with the institute.
“Writing is a form of in-depth learning that requires you to engage with course material in ways that nothing else can do,” said Elliot Shapiro, Knight Foundation Director of Writing in the Majors, which supports 39 classes each year in 22 departments across the university, mostly in non-humanities fields, where faculty members want to integrate writing into their courses to increase active engagement.
An important part of the institute’s work is its vast training infrastructure – including a six-week class for teaching assistants, a summer and fall class for new FWS graduate student instructors and the summer Faculty Seminar in Writing Instruction, which Shapiro leads. Those training classes include about 125 people each year.
“All academics are professional writers, that’s what we all do for a living, but sometimes we forget how to pass that knowledge along,” he said. The FWS course helps new writing TAs and instructors make explicit their writing processes and the ways that academic writing works so they can develop lesson plans and assessment practices to support student learning and growth, said Tracy Hamler Carrick, director of the writing workshop and graduate writing service.
Almost all students across the university are required to take at least one first-year writing seminar, and most of those are taught in the College of Arts & Sciences and managed by the Knight Institute. There are between 150-210 FWS courses offered each semester. With topics ranging from oceanography, jazz music and neuroscience to Roman politics and climate change, students can choose from a wide array of classes to fulfill the requirement.
They also have the option to enroll in special writing workshops in place of one of these FWS courses, originally created for students who were worried about their writing ability.
“There are a wide range of writers in these classes now – from those who are strong writers to those who struggle,” said Kate Navickas, Cornell Writing Centers director. “This is just an alternate route – we write more drafts than a typical FWS class and students have weekly one-on-one meetings with the instructor.”
The workshop classes can be especially helpful for some international students who may have never written an essay in English before, Navickas said.
Writing supports for students
So, just how do you help someone become a better writer?
“We teach students how to talk about the writing process,” Navickas said.
Faculty and peer tutors talk with students about the argument they’re trying to make in their essay and the evidence they’re using to support it. They talk about organization and focus, about clarity and conciseness, about paragraphs and flow. What don’t they talk about much? Grammar.
Students are using Grammarly and other tools to take care of that, Navickas said.
They also encourage students of all abilities to stretch their writing skills, Carrick said.
“Sometimes it’s not a straight climb up the hill and things don’t go just right,” she said. “But if you’re not finding yourself dealing with a pit, then you’re not making the most of your experience. We’re here to help you take big enough risks and figure out how to get out of those holes.”
Kevin Lu ’25, an economics and math major in A&S, has been a Cornell Writing Center tutor since his sophomore year. The five Cornell Writing Centers logged 2,139 appointments during the 2023-24 academic year, with 50 percent of those coming from first-year students and 50 percent from multilingual writers. Though Lu’s own classes don’t require much writing, he relishes helping others improve their skills.
A native Mandarin speaker, Lu believes there’s no such thing as bad writing, just incomplete writing.
“Most students have a good idea about what they want to write about, but they have a hard time developing those thoughts and finding their true voice,” Lu said. “One of the great things about being a tutor is that the writer who comes to me is already an expert on the topic. I’m just helping them to communicate what they think in a way that helps other people see it too.”
Navickas and Carrick say the mission of the Knight Institute is to promote a “culture of writing” on campus, to help faculty and students recognize and improve the writing they’re doing every day. The Institute’s website has a wide range of resources for writers and for writing teachers on numerous topics.
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