Students often ask me “Why do we have to write so many essays in college?” Or another way to say it is “Why do I have to take this writing class if I am going to be a nurse? Writing does not relate to nursing whatsoever.”

I want to go over a few reasons why students have to write essays, specifically research essays, in their composition courses (ENG 111 or ENG 101). I hope that looking at the deeper, unspoken reasons why students have to write essays not only in ENG 111, but also all throughout the entire higher education experience will motivate you as you write essays. If you understand why you must write essays in college, you likely will understand what skills you are learning and won’t feel like it is a waste of your education.

1.) Writing helps you to develop the skill of presenting a clear and persuasive argument to your co-workers at meetings so you can have a significant influence within your organization.

Writing in college will help you prepare for the experience of work meetings.

Writer Paul Tough wrote a book called “The Years that Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us.” His research is focused on the relevancy of college in the 21st century workplace. In a podcast recently he was asked if writing essays and having live discussions in a literature class has any relevancy to the 21st century workplace.

Tough gave an example of one of his research projects where he followed around a Princeton student and observed her experience in the classroom. One day they were sitting around a discussion table in a literature seminar discussing a Roman author. Tough said the following about the skills she was learning:

“And I realized at a certain point that it was absolutely job training. You know, like the sorts of skills that she was learning about how to sit around a conference table and speak your mind and hold an argument and analyze someone else’s argument. Like precisely, but not rudely. There are so many jobs where this is an incredibly valuable skill.”

Does it really matter what the Princeton students remember about the Roman author? Not really. What matters here is that they are developing the skill of debating on the spot with their peers. Any career that requires you to attend “meetings” means that you’ll be in on live discussions where you need to hold an argument in a room full of your coworkers. Anyone who aspires to be a leader in the workplace must know how to engage in discussions at meetings.

You will have the opportunity to sit around a boardroom table one day. Will you be rational and organized with your thoughts on that day?

If you’ve written down your thoughts beforehand and have a good argument for what you’d like to say, yes, you will be ready. Writing helps us know how to prepare before a meaningful meeting rather just trying to thrive off confidence and “winging it.”

What about a private meeting with your boss?

The skill of live persuasion and writing also applies to a private conversation with your boss. Writing can help you prepare before you go into a meeting with your boss where you strategically present an idea in a way so that your boss listens to your request.

Think of your writing assignments as preparation for future work meetings where you are prepared and ready to engage with hard issues.

2.) Writing research essays forces us to create order out of the information wilderness so that we can decide which side has the best argument.

Let’s start out with a Tik Tok video presenting this problem. My friend sent me an Instagram reel recently with a guy in sunglasses. The guy is driving his car with a backward hat and sunglasses and says the following:

“I’m 29 and I’m more confused than I ever have been. We live in a time where you have access to so much information, but the problem is that there’s so much information that you can find any information that backs up what you believe or whatever your claim is. So you are always right! But you don’t know if you are actually right. Just think of anything that you can prove it. Like I am in line to get coffee and I bet you that I can find that coffee causes blindness. I’ll Google it right now, “Coffee causes blindness. Oh lookie here. Drinking three cups a day can contribute to glaucoma. Now look, I’ll look up whether coffee can contribute to better eyesight. Oh look, it can prevent against deteriorating eyesight and possible blindness. I mean, which is it?!”

This guy has clearly articulated a problem: we have lots of information, but we still have to decide which point of view is most reasonable. We might call this the “information wilderness.” That is, we live in a time when we have lots of information, but that still means we have to make choices and decide what is the best choice and/or information. Sometimes when we Google something, we get a clear answer. But sometimes when we Google a problem we do not get a clear answer. We must decide what information helps answer our question the best.

Learning to write helps you to make choices about which claim or stance seems the most reasonable and trustworthy. Unfortunately, we do not live in a world where you can Google something and come up with answers that you can absolutely prove with 100% certainty. We all know that cigarettes cause cancer. This has been proven. But what do we do when we come across a topic that we can’t prove? What do we do when we have contradictory arguments or information, like the Tik Tok guy talking about coffee and blindness?

My goal as a teacher is to help students understand how to “make a good argument” rather than obsess over finding evidence that proves that we are right.

When you write an argument essay about a complicated topic you are learning the skill of pushing yourself to create order out of what seems like chaos. By learning to write an essay you are deciding not to despair that the world is mysterious and requires you to think, but instead, you are being an adult and making an informed decision.

Is it frustrating that the world is a complicated place? Yes. But learning to write is an opportunity to face that reality and create arguments so that you can make an informed choice. Writing helps us to make informed choices and can help other people make informed choices.

3.) The practice of writing essays will help you to write faster.

Your writing process is your own personal method for getting a writing project completed. Whether that is writing down some thoughts to say at your grandmother’s funeral, writing a cover letter for your next job or whether that is writing a research paper for your sociology class, you need to know what habits work best for you.

If you know your process, then you will write faster. Writing by nature is a slow process in itself. So ideally by being forced to write essays in ENG 111 or ENG 112 you will be forced to learn your own “writing process” and discover which habits work best for you, which could benefit you for years to come. One of the first lessons people will learn is that writing is a long process for everyone. Learning that it will help students have realistic expectations about how long it will take to write an essay.

My job as a teacher is to help you complete the task of writing faster so that you can move on to the next task.

By “write faster” I do not mean that by the end of this class, you will write a research paper in 2 hours. I mean that you will be able to pace yourself over the course of 2-3 weeks to complete a research paper. Everyone writes at their own speed. However, I’d like for your time to complete a project to get faster so you can get it over with sooner.

4.) Writing essays will force you to face your fears about writing.

It is easy to avoid situations where you know you will be required to write. I started writing a blog entry back in late August for my blog. Now it is early November and I still haven’t finished it. Part of my fear about this blog entry is that I will not get the blog entry just right. I’ve got about 10 pages of content on paper about the incredible gatherings my grandmother used to have. I have plenty of ideas. But I am being a perfectionist about this particular blog entry with the belief that I will not get it just right.

Writing essays with a deadline pushes us to face our perfectionist tendencies and face the flaws in our writing. For my blog, I don’t have a deadline. But if I did have a deadline, I probably would have been able to push through some of the problems I was having and post something on my blog that was good but not great. Deadlines do help us to stop procrastinating with our writing and face problems. Deadlines also help us to come to terms with the fact that we all have flaws in our writing (your English teacher included) and we need to believe we can learn to overcome our struggles and small grammar errors with hard work and patience.

It is possible for you to put yourself in the category of “I am not naturally good at writing.” And then by doing that, you can just handicap yourself for any future situations where you need to write. Writing essays in college helps you to face some of those fears that are holding you back.

5.) Writing helps you to become a less emotional and more accurate thinker.

I live on the coast of North Carolina next to the beach. Every summer lots of tourists drive 3 hours from Raleigh (an area many tourists come from) to visit the county I live in. It is easy to get annoyed at how packed restaurants can get and how tourist traffic on Friday clogs up the main road through town. It might be common for you to hear someone say “These beach tourists from Raleigh have ruined everything.” This complaint might get some frustration off your chest, but is it true? Have Raleigh people ruined everything? If we look at that one statement on paper could we say that it is true or false? We must ask “Could we make a good argument about this statement about Raleigh people?” Perhaps we could make a good agree or disagree debate about this, but it could easily be categorized as a generalization.

Writing helps us become less emotional about our thoughts and more logical. Writing helps us to think more objectively about our thoughts. Neil Postman says this about the written word:
“To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.”
The statement “These beach tourists from Raleigh have ruined everything,” is an overgeneralization. Yes, tourists come here on a regular basis. But to say that they have “ruined everything” is questionable. Have the tourists from Raleigh brought anything positive to the area? Are all the tourists from Raleigh? Is there something wrong with “Raleigh people?” What specifically in Carteret County have Raleigh people ruined? The heart of this sentence is hitting on something that could be very true. The presence of tourists can deeply impact a small town like Morehead City or Beaufort. So we shouldn’t ignore statements like this. But we should think about the statement to try to find out how we might write an essay looking at the impact of tourism on Carteret County.

If we want to avoid creating gossip, fake news, and rumors and be committed to what is true, then we need to write ideas down on paper and see how they hold up under critical thought. Writing is a boring process, but it also is a process that doesn’t react quickly to a rumor. This ultimately helps shut down lies and false rumors.

6.) Writing an essay helps transfer information into your long-term memory.

Journalist Nicholas Carr once said that when he skims articles on the internet, it is like riding a jet ski: 'Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.' He says that when he reads a book he is a scuba diver, thinking deeply about a particular topic, slowly pondering each idea. Yet Carr argues in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that he is skimming articles so much on Google that it is not allowing him to retain as much information. The problem becomes that we can engage with information briefly, but fail to actually “know” the information long-term. The information may not transfer to our long-term memory.

A simple solution for long-term memory is to repetitively write about one topic. Writing about a topic forces you to think about the topic in a deeper way. When I was in graduate school in 2011, I took a class I hated called “Critical Theory.” I want to stress how much I hated this class, but it was required so I had no choice. Every student in the class was assigned an author to write about and then do a short presentation on that author. I was assigned Benedict Anderson who wrote the book “Imagined Communities.” The book was about how newspapers can form a national identity within a group of people, which can lead to unhealthy forms of nationalism in communist Indonesia. I forced myself to read the book. I had to make distinctions between nationalism and patriotism. I then wrote an essay about how a person’s identity can be shaped by the country they were born in. I gave the presentation and I passed the class.

That was 10 years ago. I remember barely anything from that dreadful critical theory class except the details about Anderson’s arguments about newspapers shaping a person’s identity. The reason Anderson’s arguments have stuck in my brain is related to the fact I had to present to my peers the idea. I remember that book because I had to carefully understand it enough to write an essay on it, along with doing a presentation in front of Ph.D. students (who I did not want to look stupid in front of!). In the end, I still remember the structure of Anderson’s argument and apply his ideas to my everyday life years later.

Going back to the idea of the scuba diver and the jet ski, if you write about a topic you are closer to being a scuba diver. You might even say you are becoming an expert scuba diver of words. You are not only thinking about the words, you are reflecting on them in a way that might retain them long-term. To write about a topic is to engage with ideas in a way that will much more likely leave a permanent imprint on your brain. So you’ll likely remember what you wrote about for my class 2-3 years from now because you had to understand the topic until you were sick of it.

That’s the whole point. We want you to remember what you learn so that it sticks for years to come. Writing helps with the transfer from short-term memory to long-term memory so that you’ll remember in 2033.