Welcome to my interview series on writing, teaching writing, and using writing in different careers. In part 2 of my interview with UCSD Professor Lane Kenworthy, we discuss learning how to write, teaching writing, common issues in student writing, technology, and the future of writing amidst artificial intelligence.
Lane Kenworthy is the Yankelovich Endowed Chair Professor of Sociology at University of California, San Diego. Lane teaches undergraduates and graduates, conducts research on social science, writes several books on societal institutions, and more.
Read part 1 of our interview here.
Learning how to write
Doreen: I think you touched on several really good ideas, like learning to write in a non-jargon-y way about complex topics. So how do you write about your research in a way that’s easy for college students and everyone else to understand?
Lane: Well, I guess I should admit that I’m not certain that I do, that I succeed in that, but I do try. That’s partly because it often takes me a long time to understand the reasoning process and to think through what evidence matters for answering a particular question. I think back to my former self, my high school or college or graduate student self, and at least to an extent, I’m able to empathize with students who are encountering a particular issue or a research question or a social problem, or whatever it might be.
One other thing I’ll add is that, after getting my PhD, my expertise, to the extent I had any, was mainly on issues like poverty and income inequality and government social policy. And those are still really important parts of what I study and research on. But my interests have expanded a lot, and I end up reading all this stuff in areas where I really have little expertise, and limited familiarity with the research literature.
This, I think, injects an additional dose of humility in my thinking and makes me try to work harder when I write. Not only when writing about things that I know little about, but even about things like poverty, where I do feel like I know quite a bit. To try to write from the perspective of, or at least to be readable for, someone who has very little background knowledge about these things.
Reading like a writer and editing
Doreen: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting because, especially looking back on my experience in grad school, we are often reading and teaching on subjects that we don’t really have a lot of knowledge or expertise on. But that is part of the work, you do a lot of translation or interpretation to your students. So I’m curious, in thinking about the writing that you do now, how did you learn to write like this?
Lane: I don’t know for sure. I have a few answers. The main thing, I think, is just doing it a lot. In college, I will say, we had to take a writing course, a typical sort of freshman writing course, and the instructor I had was really good. He just gave us fantastic, very detailed feedback, and we had to write a lot, you know. It was only one semester, but I think that helped a lot. By my junior and senior year in college, and then onto graduate school, I was paying attention. I don’t know if I did this intentionally, or just accidentally, but I was paying more and more attention when I would read someone who I thought wrote clearly. I tried to emulate the way that they were writing.
Lane: I went to graduate school thinking I was going to be a Marxian theoretician. It’s not at all what I turned out to be, but that was my interest going in.
Doreen: (laughs) Okay.
Lane: At the time, this was the mid to late 1980s, I was really interested in a group of people who call themselves Analytical Marxists. There was one in particular who was trained in philosophy named Jan Elster, who I thought was an especially clear writer. And so I would just read almost everything I could get my hands on by him. A couple of my graduate student advisors, dissertation committee members also, were very good writers.
I read a lot of what they were writing and tried to absorb that as much as I could. I mean, if I had to guess at an answer, I would put it down to those three things, that freshman seminar I took, which helped a lot. My sort of interest in reading, which eventually, led to my paying attention to what I thought was clear writing. And then the third thing is just doing it. Writing over and over and over again.
Oh, and then I guess the last thing would be the fact that I really like editing. If you like editing, it makes it that much easier to get from that blank screen or that blank page to 10 pages down, 100 pages down, 200 pages down. Because then you’re closer and closer to the stage where you can really start just playing around and feeling like, okay, I’ve got something here, it’s gonna end up as a blog post. It’s going to end up as a chapter, it’s going to end up as a book, I know that. And now I can just take my time and refine it, and perfect it, and so on, and that, to me, that’s really joyous.
Teaching writing
Doreen: Yeah, so how do you teach writing to the students that you work with, like your PhD students or your undergraduates?
Lane: I guess the main answer is I don’t do very much teaching of writing. In my undergraduate classes, more and more over time, teaching assistants have graded the written work. For the PhD courses I teach, it’s either a seminar paper or a proposal for an empirical research project. Two or three of those over the course of a quarter. And then for students who are writing other papers or their dissertations, I’m providing feedback. But while I do try to give feedback, I very seldom give really detailed feedback, you know, along the lines of what that writing seminar instructor that I had in college in my first year gave me. Just because it’s so time-consuming, and it’s really hard work. But I try to help and I try to encourage. What I really try to encourage is clear thinking and clear expression, but there are different ways to do that. If I felt like I had more time, I would work harder at that, but I’m not sure that I have any sort of formula.
I think my inclination is to let students write in the way that they enjoy to the extent that they enjoy it, and then just try to hone it. But mostly just try to encourage them to think as clearly as possible and express that as clearly as they can. And then the particular way they do that is, to me, the secondary concern.
Problems in student writing
Doreen: Yeah. So, have you ever had students where you felt like the writing was a problem or an issue that you needed to address?
Lane: Sure, although it’s probably more often actually a language barrier, because in our PhD program, we have a lot of non-native English speakers. And that was true in some previous places that I was teaching at. And I think it’s a great thing that the United States has more and more, and in our particular department, has more and more students who aren’t necessarily native English speakers. And that’s idiosyncratic. Different students have different issues, but it’s also just a familiarity and practice. And so part of the advice is just to write more and more and more, because you get better and better and better at it.
Doreen: Yes, of course.
Lane: So the short answer is yes, and I do tend to try to give more attention to the writing of students who struggle more with it. But I also tend to strongly encourage them to take advantage of other resources that are available specifically targeted to writing, like the Writing Hub (at UCSD). The tutors that we have within the sociology department, and increasingly, you know, online mechanisms for students who might find that helpful.
Technology and artificial intelligence
Doreen: Speaking of online mechanisms, how do you see these trends in technology like generative AI happening in the future, in terms of your research, teaching, or writing?
Lane: I mostly don’t know.
Doreen: Okay.
Lane: For me, we’re so early in this process that I don’t feel very confident at all about where exactly this is going to lead. But I guess I can offer a couple speculative thoughts.
Lane: For me, I’ll say one of the biggest uncertainties is how far we’re going to end up going with just letting AI (artificial intelligence) tools do the writing itself. So I don’t know whether they’re going to become like what calculators were to simple math. And like statistics software to statistical calculations. When I was a PhD student in the mid to late 1990s, when we took the standard 2 to 3 semester statistics sequence, we had to do almost all the calculations by hand. The logic at that time was it’s important to know the underlying calculations to be able to do and use statistical analysis in your research. That’s not true anymore. We just go straight into the software.
And I think that’s turned out to be fine. I think mostly we just moved on to spending our brain power doing other things. I don’t think we know yet whether AI tools are going to take over the writing for almost everybody. And if that happens, whether that’s going to be a huge loss. Maybe it’ll have both pros and cons. I just don’t know. I mean, it looks like the tools are pretty good, and so if I had to put down money, unfortunately, I would bet that for a lot of humans, a lot of writing in a decade, two decades, maybe 200 years from now is going to be either talking to a machine and saying, “Write this up.” Maybe we won’t be writing at all. Everything will be video and voice. I just don’t know, and I don’t know what that’s going to mean for how I teach undergraduate students or graduate students, or what I do with my own research.
Doreen: Yeah, that’s fair.
Lane: So, let’s say, optimistically, I’m an active researcher and teacher for another 20 years. That puts me at 80, which is old, but not too, too old by the standards of academia. We’ll see. But anyway, for better or worse, it’s probably not going to have a massive impact on my own career. That’s for future cohorts and generations.
But I think there’s a real possibility that it’ll have a dramatic change, and I just don’t know what that’ll be in teaching, in the production of research, and what it means to produce a dissertation or a journal article in the future. I don’t know what it means in terms of the number of academics.
Maybe social scientists and other types of scientists will all be so much more productive that we’ll be able to create vaccines for everything, and solve the problems of poverty and economic growth and community and longevity. Solve those problems much more quickly and effectively and efficiently. I don’t know.
Doreen: Well, who knows? But it’s refreshing to hear you say that you don’t really do a lot of teaching of writing in classes, because that’s also what I found. A lot of times, what happens is that when writing support is outsourced to outside resources, like the Writing Hub, the support becomes very precarious.
Lane: Yeah, I think that’s been true at each of the places that I’ve been at. Academics at a place like UCSD or Arizona or Emory, where I was before, they’re rewarded mainly on research. Their main interest is in research, and so if they have a choice about how to spend their time, and they don’t always have a choice, but when they do, they’re almost always going to choose research.
I’m hopeful about this new move to create teaching professorships. If it expands, and I very much hope it will, will eventually include hiring just a writing specialist. Again, this is presuming that AI doesn’t take over all the writing. But I think that would be great, you know, if we had one or even two people in a department of 25-ish faculty. Whose main task was to help people improve their–- including faculty, by the way–- to help them improve their writing.
Doreen: Yeah, that’s a great point.
Lane: I don’t know if it’ll happen or not.
Doreen: Probably not (laughs).
Lane: But that’d be great if it did.
Many thanks to Professor Lane Kenworthy for his time. Readers interested in his work can check out his UCSD profile and his website.
Stay tuned for the next installment in this interview series: I talk with christina ong, Lecturer in Asian American Studies at San Diego State University, about writing (and not writing) in graduate school, creative writing, winning awards for screenplays, and uncertainties about teaching writing.
Leave a Reply