Why write? 8 (and more) Reasons To Write

It’s that time of year again with students and professors returning to school.  Since many of my clients are in the academic arena, and I have a daughter seriously considering a return to graduate school, I am attuned to this particular season. With the return to school comes a return to writing assignments, and with it the question always arises, “Why bother to write?”

For me, the simplest answer is, “Because it clarifies thinking.”  Whether you are writing in a journal of your own to sort out the emotions of the past 24 hours, or you are writing an analytical paper on the lives of mollusks, the very act of writing something down begins to tell you what is really going on in your brain about the topic. It can be an incredible journey of discovery.

For teachers, there is an interesting piece of research that suggests that even ungraded, brief writing assignment facilitate learning (Drabrick, Weisberg, Paul, and Bubier, 2007): “Just 5 minutes of writing on a particular topic per week (45 minutes per semester) produced significantly higher scores on test items than did the same amount of time spent on thinking.”

For students, the answer may be as boringly pragmatic as “getting a better grade on a test or paper.” To get a degree requires fulfilling certain requirements, and to graduate with a bachelor’s degree does imply having some knowledge of the written word for prospective employers or graduate school admission committees.

So I reiterate, “Why write?” Here are 8, and more, reasons to write:

1.  Writing is a form of activism. You write to persuade other people to change.  This can mean changing their perspective or persuading them to take action. Think of the success of the book and movie, The Help, itself a story about how the act of writing changes the people who both wrote it and read it.

2.  Writing can help generate new ideas and synthesize large amounts of information. Written notes while you are reading can help with this, too.

3.  You learn to organize your ideas in a coherent pattern, finding the flaws in the reasoning or the gaps in expression.  Alternatively, you may discover unexpected relationships that clarify or illuminate original discoveries.

4.  Writing over time on the same topic can help you see how your own thoughts have evolved on a particular topic.  You may discover there was a side to the topic that you had not previously considered that actually makes sense.  Or you may discover that although there is another side, your own reasoning takes you to a particular conclusion.

5.  Sometimes a simple list of pros and cons can help with making decisions of any sort.

6.  The act of writing helps aid memory and the retention of both the information and the sources of that information.

7. Writing allows you to speak asynchronously to an audience that is actually interested in your particular point of view.  It may be that once you have graduated from college you never write anything longer than a one-page memo about business to your boss, but it will still be a useful skill.  If you stay in academia, you will have to get better and better at expressing yourself and your own unique perspective as you pursue higher degrees like a master’s or a doctorate.

8.  Last but not least, write because it’s fun.  It’s exciting to see a creation take form and emerge from intellectual engagement with an idea. It becomes a thing of substance, something concrete. Writer Neil Gaiman says, “The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page…and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience.”

As Seth Godin reminds us, writing “gives ideas substance and allows them to travel” both literally across the world and into the minds and hearts of other people. Now, instead of asking, “Why write?” ask instead, “What do I want to write about?  Why do I want to write about it? Who am I trying to reach and what do I want them to do?”  Challenge yourself, stay engaged in the process, and the reason for writing will make itself clear to you.

 

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