People who can write well are more likely to excel in college, more likely to graduate with honors, more attractive to potential employers, and more likely to advance in their careers. Engineering, architecture, business, medicine, law, whatever—writing is central to success in all of these life choices.

But even more importantly, expressing one’s self in words is essential to your humanity. Everything that you are—your attitudes, your beliefs, your ideas, your knowledge—is inside you. When you are asked to “explain yourself,” to “flesh out an idea,” to “argue for your point of view,” you are being asked to bring part of yourself out into the world.

Writing is the most sophisticated means of doing this. Writing helps you to move through the world, cultivating relationships with family, friends, lovers, acquaintances, and colleagues. Writing well enhances the quality of these relationships; not writing well diminishes them. Not writing at all is to largely remain a mystery to the world, alone.

Unfortunately, my experience is that most students arrive at college with underdeveloped writing skills. When they try to put words to paper they tend to do so awkwardly. It’s like watching someone trying to walk with a new artificial limb.

I think this is because most students don’t read as much as they should, or if they do read, they don’t read very good writing. In the age of social media, they mostly read snarky memes and acronyms, and as a result, the quality of their own writing barely exceeds these degraded forms of expression.

More alarming of late is the advent of chatbots, which has tempted many students to let AI do their writing for them. Obviously this is a form of cheating, but even more obvious is the fact that these students are only cheating themselves in passing up opportunities to improve their writing. They’re like runners training for a marathon by driving around town in a car, expecting to do well on the day of the race.

The good news is that so long as you do your own writing, it can be improved. In my classes, my goal is for students to be able to write a complete and coherent sentence, paragraph, and paper. This can be achieved through careful attention to thesis development and support, organization, structure, transitions, word choice, spelling, grammar, syntax, and punctuation.

In short, my goal is to enhance the clarity of your expression. Striving for clarity allows you to  inspect the quality of your own ideas, and to be inspired to express them in a voice that speaks from your own unique perspective of the world.

Achieving clarity in your writing requires practice. Writing should be understood as a process, and this process should be understood in terms of rewrites. In my classes, students are encouraged to re-write their papers. Those students who take advantage of this policy almost inevitably earn excellent grades; those who do not tend to be deeply disappointed.

Ultimately, the strength or weakness of student writing skills is wholly up to each student, and I stand ready to assist the motivated student. If a student fails to put in the effort to develop these skills, their world will be impoverished. On the other hand, if they work hard to strengthen these skills, their world will be enlarged and enriched to an immeasurable degree.

© D. R. Koukal