When Art of Writing (AoW) launched 14 years ago, the goal was to create writers at Berkeley. Since then, the program’s small, seminar-style courses have become a space where future data scientists, lawyers, engineers, sociologists, artists, and writers sit at the same table and explore how writing intersects with the intellectual worlds they inhabit. The program offers courses on a broad range of topics, including food writing, data aesthetics, sports fandom, the philosophy of lying, and more. All AoW seminars aim to treat writing as an ongoing process, and to show how that process adapts across disciplines and genres.
AoW courses offer something rare at a large research university: intimacy, reflection, and an interdisciplinary approach to writing that is difficult to achieve in lecture halls of 400+ students. In the process, students find their signature voices and leave with a changed relationship to thinking, reading, and learning. At the same time, instructors, who possess deep expertise in the content in their fields, are trained through pedagogy workshops to teach writing in their respective disciplines.
Today, long after their AoW courses have ended, former students and faculty say the impact of those seminars still reverberates.
Bridging STEM and Humanities: Angela Lin’s Interdisciplinary Journey
Angela Lin (‘24), who double majored in English and Data Science, recalls “stumbling into both majors.” Data Science felt like a practical path to many opportunities, while English — a field she never expected to pursue — captivated her after she enrolled in a Russian short fiction course in the Slavic Department. Her professor’s passion was so infectious that it led her to take more literature courses and ultimately inspired her decision to double major.
She first heard about the Art of Writing course, “Writing Robots,” taught by Margaret Kolb, during the spring of her senior year. Its interdisciplinary approach immediately intrigued her. “I’d never taken a course that mixed my interests in English and Data Science so well,” she says. Professor Kolb’s background in both math and English made Angela feel understood in a way she hadn’t before, and they still stay in touch.
The class brought together a diverse group of students—roughly half from STEM fields and half from the humanities. Angela recalls thought-provoking conversations about AI, ethics, and how artificial intelligence is reshaping the creative arts — and beyond. She especially appreciated the reading assignments, which “covered technical subjects” but were clearly chosen by someone invested in the humanities, creating a unique combination of perspectives.
One standout assignment was a ghostwriting project in which students were asked to write in someone else’s voice. “With generative AI … we all, in some way, ghostwrite,” she explains, “but we often don’t think of it that way.” The project was a unique way to explore how modern writing tools influence writers, and how unsettling it can feel to write from another person’s perspective. Angela emphasizes that overreliance on generative tools risks diluting one’s personal voice, something she sees as essential to how she thinks and engages with the world.
The course also deepened her understanding of interpretation itself. “When comparing human reading to how language models ingest information, it’s interesting to see parallels, yet also the fundamental differences. These ideas still stay with me today and feel especially relevant in our current environment.”
After graduation, Angela spent a year working as a data scientist at an AI startup. She left the role in the summer of 2025 and now teaches ESL online while pursuing a small art business.
Her experience in tech underscored the close connection between data analysis and literary analysis. “As someone whose day-to-day job involved collecting, cleaning, analyzing data, and presenting reports, it’s important to stay aware of your own biases in interpretation. In the humanities, you’re taught to pay close attention to how you interpret texts, and that helped my technical work a lot.”
She adds that writing teaches you how to tailor your voice to your audience—a skill that’s important in any field. English classes teach you to slow down and spend time understanding a text or crafting a piece. “In a world that emphasizes speed, there’s so much value in pausing, revisiting, and rereading.”
Angela believes that almost everything today is interdisciplinary — humanities students can’t afford to ignore STEM, and STEM students benefit immensely from engaging with the humanities. “If you ignore one half, you lose so much.” She encourages students to “broaden their perspective and see how the work of reading relates to how a data scientist approaches a data set. The tools differ, but the motivations can be similar.”
She concludes by saying Art of Writing courses are designed to be approachable for students across majors. For students who find writing intimidating, she encourages them to give it another chance. Art of Writing seminars are “a great way to become a more intentional writer in a supportive environment.”
Her final piece of advice is to get to know your professor and take at least one discussion-based or seminar-style class. “There is so much value in engaging in thoughtful, productive debate—it leads to meaningful conversations.” One class can make a big difference. For Angela, it shaped her educational path.
Professor Kim Voss on Writing, Sociology, and Science Communication
For Professor Kim Voss in the Sociology Department, her Art of Writing courses are among the favorites she has taught throughout her years as an educator.
She taught the 20-person seminar twice: once as “Writing Across the Partisan Divide” and once as “Writing Out of Berkeley.” While the titles changed, the core ideas remained the same.
Her motivation to teach an Art of Writing course grew out of broader efforts to strengthen undergraduate writing. “When I was chair of my department, we were all noticing serious problems with student writing, but there didn’t seem to be any way to offer more training.” So, she and her colleague created a Writing for Sociology guide, which deepened her commitment to improving writing instruction.
Working with a graduate student, she designed a course on social science writing and translating academic articles into science communication. The course asked students to rewrite sociological journal articles for a general, educated audience — essentially, to learn how to make sociological findings compelling. The guiding principle was “good writing is good editing.”
Every piece of student writing underwent multiple rounds of feedback from the instructor, the teaching fellow, and peers before being revised. For one of the course’s most noteworthy projects, students wrote a 3,000-word article modeled after a piece from The Atlantic, a genre many hadn’t encountered before.
The course was highly collaborative. Readings were analyzed not only for their sociological arguments but also for their craft — “structure, evidence, transitions.” Students wrote weekly reflections addressing each aspect and often had to pull out a transition sentence they thought worked particularly well. “That level of attention to writing is incredibly unusual in sociology courses,” Professor Voss notes.
She observed that students’ disciplinary backgrounds shaped their writing. “The history major read more deeply and used better metaphors … an engineering student was more inclined to think in terms of right versus wrong answers, whereas students in the humanities and social sciences often required more nuance.” In general, students discussed data extensively, using it to evaluate texts and support their arguments.
Overall, “[the course] worked wonderfully,” Professor Voss says. “Students really improved and were very invested.” She discovered that some juniors and seniors struggled to read social science articles, often mistaking the literature review for the findings. That experience showed her “the disconnect between what faculty assume and what students actually know,” which reshaped her approach to teaching.
Since teaching the course, she has become more intentional about ensuring students “truly know how to read academic articles.” She fully embraces the AoW philosophy that “good writing is good editing” in all her courses. Her teaching now includes more scaffolding for final papers, a stronger emphasis on editing and peer feedback, and far more detailed feedback from her—all shaped by what she learned through her Art of Writing experience.
The course also sharpened her attention to transitions and clarity in her own writing. “Even when I was writing my dissertation, I struggled with transitions—making them clear without sounding awkward. I had already begun paying attention to models, but now I do so even more.”
She credits much of the course’s success to her GSI. Usually, a large required course is assigned only one GSI. But AoW seminars, with only 15-25 students, are co-taught with GSIs , something she found extraordinary. Her co-instructor had journalistic experiences, and their close collaboration when planning lessons, coursework, and grading, was a rare experience for her in university teaching, and elevated every aspect of the course. When she taught her AoW seminar a second time, she chose to work with the same GSI.
She smiles as she says she would love to teach an AoW course again. Many students from her first seminar still keep in touch and describe the class as deeply influential. “They liked paying attention to writing, loved the detailed feedback, and appreciated thinking about how to write for people who disagreed with them.”
In the end, the Art of Writing program showed her how “creative and useful it can be to focus on writing in this way.” Few sociology courses incorporate such a thorough structure of editing, peer review, and repeated translation assignments. Seeing her students grow within that framework made it one of her peak teaching experiences.
Shaping Students and Faculty Beyond the Classroom
What happens to a writing course after the semester ends? For these interviewees, it keeps unfolding in practice, memory, and in the skills they have cultivated.
Art of Writing courses teach writing, yes. But they also teach students and faculty how to interpret, express, and translate ideas across disciplines. Through AoW seminars, writers are created at Berkeley, but the conclusion of their course is not the end of their writerly journey.