WHY WRITE

I. Why Write?

• Practical reasons
• Intellectual reasons

II. The writing process

III. How do you keep working hard

 

Now you are a Prep School student and you are here to learn English. Next year, you are going to study literature, administrative sciences or engineering. You may ask yourself “Why should I write? I didn’t do much writing at high school and here I am.” There are practical reasons why you should write and there are also intellectual reasons why you should learn to write.

 

Practical reasons:

1. You will have to answer essay exams, and write term papers, reports and theses in your undergraduate courses.

 

2. If you carry on with your studies, and do graduate work, then you will write more advanced papers, articles, master’s and PhD theses.

 

These are the academic requirements you will have to fulfill. However, there are also other reasons which are not directly related to practical requirements but which  concern you more as a person: to be more specific, your intellectual faculties.

 

Intellectual reasons:

1. Writing helps you think: You generate ideas and search more abstract thinking levels

 

2. Writing helps you organize your thoughts:

·        You generate ideas

·        Write them down

·        Go over the ideas you have written down, clustering and organizing them

 

3. Writing helps you remember information: From simple notes written to remind yourself things to notes you take while you are reading, writing helps you remember

 

4. Writing helps you find logical faults or gaps in your own thinking or understanding: By writing about what you have read, you see what you have understood. When you have difficulty expressing something you see that you did not understand it well, and realize you have to revise or study more.

 

5. Writing helps you develop your own attitude towards a subject: You are interested in an issue, you start reading about it. You come to see that there are many different issues involved in it, or that there are different sides to it. You read the opinions of those who are for it and those who are against it. Then, you make a list of pros and cons, and as you write you decide where you stand as regards this particular issue.

 

6. Writing helps you synthesize large amounts of information. You read, you write and as you write on, you discover new ideas, new relations, new cause-effect relations, etc. You start using concepts and terms to label your ideas or relations. Therefore, writing helps you conceptualize your ideas, and think in a more abstract way.

 

7. Writing helps you record information. Thoughts come and go, but writing remains. Therefore, you may record ideas and thoughts for future reference. Your journal entries, for instance, record your standpoint, your attitude to issues, or they display the development and unraveling of your thought processes.

 

8. Writing is different from speaking in that your target audience, that is your reader, is not present when you are writing. Therefore, you learn to express yourself clearly and in a way that would not lead to any misunderstanding by your readers. You think about who your readers will be, think about what they will know and what they will not, organize your ideas accordingly and write coherently. In short, writing helps you communicate your ideas better, more clearly and in a more organized way.

 

II. The writing process                                    Top of the page

Whether you are writing an essay for your prep writing class or a term paper for your professor, you have to make certain decisions:

 

1. What is this essay/paper about? The answer to this question determines the subject of your writing.

2. Why am I writing this? What do I want to do by writing this? This establishes the purpose of your text. The purpose of your paper or essay may be to classify, to compare and contrast or to persuade.

3. Who am I writing this for? Who is my target audience? My classmates, my teacher, my professor, etc. The answer to this question determines how much detail will be given.

4. What is my tone or attitude? Informal, formal, colloquial, conversational, etc. The answer here determines the style of the essay too. Style affects:

·        Choice of words

·        Sentence structure

·        Punctuation

 

The important thing when you are writing is not to be discouraged. Writing is hard for everyone, even for the great writers. It is even more difficult to write in a foreign language. Isaac Bashevich Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for literature, once said, “I believe in miracles in every area of life, except writing. Experience has shown me that there are no miracles in writing. The only thing that produces good writing is hard work.”

 

III. How do you keep working hard?

• Challenge yourself; keep your interest level high

• If you are interested in your work, your reader will be too. But if you are bored with your writing, your reader will also be bored. If you say I am writing this because I have been assigned this homework, your interest will be low, both you and your reader will be bored.

• Think of every piece of writing as something worth doing and something worth doing is worth doing well.  

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Written by Zeliha Gulcat, May 2004