Helping Students Write

Since October, I’ve been sitting for two days every week in a low-beamed attic above Magdalene Porters' Lodge, meeting students who want to make a piece of writing stronger.

I’m employed by the Royal Literary Fund, a body with a Royal Charter, founded in 1790 simply, at first, to help writers. Coleridge was its first beneficiary. It has funded Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Doris Lessing, among many others, and acquires its own money from legacies. It now works all over the UK to place writers as ‘Writing Fellows’ in Higher Education institutions, to help students with academic writing. Tutors have their hands full teaching their actual subject, but many schools never really teach students to write an essay. Some are fine when they reach university, but many struggle. They speak their own language perfectly well, but while reading complex academic papers for their course, they often find it fighting them on the page.

I have taught Greek and poetry in my time, but as an RLF Fellow I am simply a writer. My brief is not to engage with the subject of an essay but to concentrate on all aspects of writing it. Building the argument, citing supporting evidence, deft uses of paragraph and cadence, grammar and punctuation. Whatever level a student is, I try to help them polish their writing for life. Anyone in College can come. If the Master wanted help with a paragraph on international law, or the gardener with a tractate on chrysanthemums, they would be welcome. But mostly I get graduates and undergraduates. Some come because their supervisor recommended it, but most just wish to make a piece of writing better.

News of this service spreads gradually among students studying different subjects. I had a spate of archaeologists, then medical students, historians, lawyers, neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers. Now English students are coming. This week, I saw twelve students over two days. For some, one session is enough. It is such a pleasure to watch them get the point. “Oh yes — I see!” Others keep coming back, especially those on an M.Phil course, where they get less personal teaching.

It makes me realise how varied all the teaching is, proceeding silently behind the College’s pale walls. I learn how diagnoses of autism consider the different ways in which autism shows itself in girls, how the Mughals fared in the Deccan in the seventeenth century and how women wrote up their travels in the eighteenth; the role of shrunken heads in pre-Columbian Amazonian societies and the molecular structure of the best material for knee replacements. I’m working on a document myself about writing an essay. which I thought I might offer the College at the end of my two years, in gratitude for being allowed to play a tiny part, for a while, in such a warm and supportive community of learning.

By Professor Ruth Padel, Royal Literary Fund Teaching Bye-Fellow

Professor Ruth Padel (2024) is a poet, novelist and non-fiction author, Fellow of the Royal Society and the Zoological Society of London, Professor of Poetry Emerita at King’s College London. Her poetry collections include Darwin, a Life in Poems, about her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin. While Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Magdalene, she is also finishing a non-fiction book on elephants and the environment. Find out more at www.ruthpadel.com.

This article first appeared in Magdalene Matters: Issue 55.