Writing, clear and simple
Jamie Rees ’12 turned in the first pages of his senior thesis and heard the two words every writer dreads: Start over. “I had to write a draft during first semester,” said Rees, an economics concentrator who is writing about the debt crisis in the Euro zone. “I was still doing a lot of data stuff, and I didn’t want to write anything yet. I ended up spitting out pages of writing that was terrible.” The good news is that the feedback came from bestselling author Walter Isaacson ’74, the former chairman of CNN and managing editor of Time, and was part of the Harvard College Winter Writing Program, a two-week Winter Break seminar for undergraduate nonfiction writers. Rees was one of 50 students admitted to the program, which is co-taught by Isaacson and Evan Thomas ’73, the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and former editor at large at Newsweek. “It’s...