writing the essay nyu professors

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Writing as Inquiry

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In Writing as Inquiry, you are invited to work together with students from CAS, Steinhardt, Meyers, and Silver whose interests span the curriculum—and one hundred different majors—to develop meaningful, original writing. This class is designed so that students of all backgrounds and abilities share ideas as equals and develop together as colleagues. Our faculty are essayists, poets, novelists, academic writers, social scientists, and playwrights. We are all writers who share the conviction that writing is a crucial tool for unlocking and creating knowledge within the university and for making change in the wider world. The diverse interests that we bring to our conversations as teachers of writing mirror the multiperspectival conversations that you will have with other students in our classrooms, where budding writers consider the published work of accomplished authors alongside the developing drafts of their classmates.

Writing as Inquiry offers you the reading, writing, and thinking practices essential for rigorous engagement in your courses across New York University and challenges you to develop a sense of yourself as a writer who addresses the urgent questions of our times. Writing as Inquiry may be your first encounter with the essay as an academic and creative form that embraces inquiry and acts as a path to knowledge, rather than a statement of opinion or position: instead of justifying assumptions, essay writing unwinds them. Here you can begin to explore evidence through open-minded questions and come to develop ideas through analysis. You will be introduced to the concept that writing begins with inquiry and persists through an ever-evolving exchange of ideas. Writing is a process of vision and revision: you will revisit and revise your own writing as you come to know your sources, audiences, and discourse communities with increasing expertise.

Over the course of a semester, you will come to understand the many ways that you may engage with texts and evidence and become confident in your choices. You will begin to transcend static, binary positions and instead build nuanced interpretations and conversations that allow simultaneous admiration and skepticism. Learning multiple modes of analysis leads not only to more dynamic and accurate treatments of evidence, but to a habit of thinking more deeply and intricately. You will come to employ these habits of thought as you create complex ideas through the essay, and you’ll learn that your ideas can be meaningful, innovative, and difference-making. As your ideas accumulate and mature, you will mold your own voice and identity as a writer. Sharing your work and views with the classroom community, you will practice the social process of writing. Through this shared work, you will begin to find your path among a community of emerging scholars.

Writing as Inquiry pushed me to further explore and effectively communicate my ideas through my writing. It is a great foundational course that I encourage students to use as an opportunity to engage their creativity as they develop and refine their technical skills. - Kendall Ross, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, 2021

Although I never looked forward to essay classes in college, Writing as Inquiry has given me analysis and representation skills that I can apply throughout the rest of my college career. The in-class discussions were always engaging, and I looked forward to every meeting session. - Eric Yao

To this day, I regard Writing as Inquiry as one of the most important classes I’ve taken in NYU. It was there for the first time I learned that words matter. This is a lesson I’ve taken with me to every internship, course or personal life experience I’ve had since then. - Adriana Sofia Monzon, CAS, 2021

Out of all the classes I’ve taken at NYU, Writing as Inquiry has made the most lasting impression on me. It gave me confidence in my own ideas and reignited my sense of intellectual curiosity. This course didn’t just teach me how to write, it also taught me how to think. - Emily Yan, Stern School of Business, 2021

Writing as Inquiry was my most transformative NYU experience. Instead of being constrained by writing structures taught in highschool, this was where I first learned to trust in and express my own voice, and has given me the ability creatively, academically, and professionally communicate my voice in a cogent manner. - Iris Wu Zimmer, CAS 2021

Learning Outcomes, Skills, and Techniques

When a student attends a section of Writing the Essay at Washington Square, they can expect to

Read thoughtfully and attentively with the purposes of questioning, understanding, and responding as a writer in an ongoing discourse

Pose and explore complex intellectual problems

Select, integrate, and analyze sources that illuminate complex problems

Use research tools, such as library and public databases, to independently locate useful, appropriate, and interesting topics and sources 

Ethically represent sources, including the work of other writers and creators, in order to engage with them fairly and thoughtfully 

Practice analytical techniques that carry across a variety of source types and disciplines

Build clear and complex arguments through the analysis and synthesis of multiple sources

Create original ideas through argumentation and analysis

Learn rhetorical practices to attend to genre, audience, discipline, and convention

Write clear complex essays that develop through inductive reasoning

Revise written work deeply to improve higher order concerns, like structure and argument

Understand writing as a process that happens over time, through feedback and revision, and within a community

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