So What Will My Professors Expect, Anyway?

We think that most students find writing in college more challenging than writing in high school. Just not in the way most expect it to be before they get here.

In our experience, most students tend to worry that college professors will want their papers to more formal or “professional”-sounding, by which they seem to mean free of small grammar errors and consistent with certain formatting standards they’re not yet sure they understand. And longer. Especially longer.

At some level, this is true enough.

Though nobody likes “filler,” your professors will look for you to sustain a focused and effectively connected discussion across a number of pages. Most formal paper assignments in college probably require at least 4 or 5 pages of prose – roughly 1000-1250 words – and sometimes much more, especially as you get to advanced courses.

And of course, your professors will also like it if your papers seem carefully prepared and polished, not like you’ve dashed them off between 1 and 3 a.m., after a night out with friends. (This is a writing process we definitely don’t recommend, by the way. Revise thoughtfully and edit carefully – what’s on the page really matters. Look for more on this below, and see our section on Writing Processes for a fuller discussion of how and why.)

Writing and Thinking: Being a "Co-Investigator"

More than anything else, however, what we think most of your professors will really look for in your papers that you may not have included in high school is, well, you – or at least your ideas.

That is, many high school teachers grade in large part for tidiness in written work, a sense that you’ve jumped through certain hoops without making many mistakes. They hope your paper will be what George Orwell, who you may know as the author of the classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, called “a graceful monument to the obvious.” We understand this: a big part of their job is just to make sure students are able to communicate an idea and transfer some content reliably for readers. But most college professors look for papers to be less reports than records of your evolving thoughts. They want you to try to participate in the discussion of whatever topic you engage, to articulate some idea of your own, maybe even one they hadn’t considered before.

They want you to be what the influential Brazilian education theorist Paulo Freire called a “co-investigator.” Basically, college professors want you to spend some time thinking with them.

So What's This Mean, Practically Speaking?

Unless the assignment specifically calls for it, as is sometimes the case – like in lab reports or case law reviews – don’t make the purpose of most papers to summarize, recap, or cite reference sources for “background.”

Instead, generally speaking, articulate some authentic response to the ideas developed in the course and the task outlined in the assignment. What do you disagree with, how might you extend the ideas you’ve been discussing in class, what problems do you think could emerge as they are applied? Develop a thesis, a claim, an animating focus – or whatever you choose to call the idea you build your paper around – and use some form of evidence effective in the discipline to back it up. Have something to say.

We believe your professors will appreciate that, and they’ll probably respond in kind – that is, thoughtfully, as co-investigators, to use Freire’s language. Their job is to help make your ideas richer, better defined, more fully thought through, and most will see the planning, drafting, and revising of papers as the main place this takes place.

Academic Writing as a "Conversation"

For this reason, lots of people use the word “conversation” to describe academic writing.

Here’s how David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky talk about this in the introduction to their well-known collection of readings for first-year writing courses, called Ways of Reading:

We’d like you to imagine that when you read the works we’ve collected here, somebody is saying something to you, and we’d like you to imagine that you are in a position to speak back, to say something of your own in turn. In other words, we are not presenting our book as a miniature library (a place to find information) and we do not think of you, the reader, as a term-paper writer (a person looking for information to write down on three-by-five cards).

When you read, you hear an author’s voice as you move along; you believe a person with something to say is talking to you. You pay attention, even when you don’t completely understand what is being said, trusting that it will all make sense in the end, relating what the author says to what you already know or expect to hear or learn. Even if you don’t quite grasp everything you are reading at every moment (and you won’t), and even if you don’t remember everything you’ve read (no reader does—at least not in long, complex pieces), you begin to see the outlines of the author’s project, the patterns and rhythms of that particular way of seeing and interpreting the world.

When you stop to talk or write about what you’ve read, the author is silent; you take over—it is your turn to write, to begin to respond to what the author said. At that point this author and his or her text become something you construct out of what you remember or what you notice as you go back through the text a second time, working from passages or examples but filtering them through your own predisposition to see or read in particular ways.

As we’ve said, your professors will have different expectations for different assignments – some genres, like lab reports or judicial case summaries, even prohibit writers from offering personal response or commentary of any sort. Still, we agree with Bartholomae and Petrosky that the kind of exchange they describe here is the essence of academic writing and that it’s the general habit of mind you should develop as you begin writing for college. We recommend that you think of most paper assignments as the moment you get your turn to weigh in on the topic at hand, just as they do – an exciting prospect!

Fit and Finish

That said, while they’ll want you to write thoughtfully, your professors will also look for your work to be carefully polished and presented.

We recommend that you reread several times, giving yourself space between readings so you can approach your work with a fresh mind and separating the moment you reread for ideas and organization (that is, to revise) from moments you reread for sentence structure and small errors (that is, to edit). Again, see our section on “Writing Process(es)” for a fuller treatment of these ideas.

Format and Page Layout

Be aware that there is no single “proper” page layout or bibliographical format required universally for college writing. If they care about format, your professors will likely all have different expectations about this based in part on the standards in their discipline. Look for instructions about this in assignment sheets and other materials from your instructors. If you’re not sure, ask!

Intellectual Integrity

Expectations about intellectual integrity, on the other hand – that what you turn in is your own work and that you acknowledge whatever language or ideas you take from any sources you consult – will generally be shared across all instructors and departments. Please see our section on “Proper Citation and Avoiding Plagiarism” as well as the college’s Academic Integrity Policy for a further elaboration of what’s ok and what’s not.