Writing is the academic skill most linked to college success. It’s also one of the top skills employers seek, though one they report most often missing in their new-hires.
Here’s a quick explainer to help understand why writing skills are important.
Your Personal Communication Toolkit
Colleges and employers value good writing skills in part because they recognize that people who write well possess an array of high-level competencies that apply across many varieties of subject matter and types of projects, including transferable skills and critical thinking skills.
These skills form a personal “communication toolkit” that is highly prized within school—and throughout work life.
What Do These Transferable Skills Look Like?
In composing a successful extended, source-based academic essay, students:
- Demonstrate that they understand a complex task and their purpose for working on it; Recognize the needs and expectations of people who will evaluate their work;
- Generate productive ideas that are well suited to a given task, audience, and purpose;
- Demonstrate that they can successfully scope and plan a complex intellectual project;
- Find relevant, credible information, analyze it, and make discerning use of it in their own work;
- Identify and define a specific, relevant problem residing within a broad domain of information and debate;
- Formulate a coherent response to a defined problem, based on their analysis of a range of information and perspectives;
- Stake out a persuasive position on a debatable issue, and effectively support it with an argument grounded in evidence and logical reasoning;
- Organize a collection of materials, information, and ideas into a coherent presentation;
- Communicate complex ideas clearly and effectively;
- Skillfully revise their work in response to feedback from others and their own self-critique;
- Produce a polished final product.
Research shows the process of writing an extended, research-supported academic essay—the type of writing students will repeatedly be asked to produce in college—provides an unmistakable demonstration of the author’s knowledge, the quality of their thinking, their capacity for executing a complex intellectual task, and their skill at communicating clearly and effectively.
Via peer review sessions, students can additionally hone their ability to offer constructive feedback on the work of their classmates, and display the level of effort they’re willing to put into advancing their own education.
Critical Thinking Skills—High School vs. College Expectations
Beyond these transferable skills, the additional cultivation of key critical thinking skills is another key reason why writing skills are important.
College students are expected to employ critical thinking in their compositions by insightfully analyzing and evaluating information, arguments, and perspectives from other sources, and by contributing ideas, arguments, and solutions of their own.
Prior to college, however, much of secondary-school writing instruction emphasizes formulas and surface features over disciplined inquiry and rigorous analysis.
Standardized testing in particular tends to focus secondary school writing instruction on form at the expense of content.
As a result, many students come to believe that correct form and mechanics, more than substance, constitute good writing.
This misconception can be a major impediment to success for new college students and why writing skills are important to practice and refine AHEAD of arriving for that first semester of college.
Why Writing Skills Are Important in College
In higher education, writing is understood as much more than a means for demonstrating command of form and language: writing is itself a method of learning, an occasion for complex problem-solving, a tool for discovering and refining one’s own thinking, and for contributing meaningfully to conversations within a discourse community.
Students benefit from understanding prior to beginning their college careers that academic writing will be a primary means for demonstrating not only their language skills and mastery of form…but also the depth of their knowledge and the quality of their thinking.
Pre-college writing instruction, therefore, should ideally equip them with this understanding. That goal is a large part of the mission behind creating my College-Ready Writing website and the targeted resources I’ve created there to help educators and families best equip their collegebound teens for what lies ahead.
Why Writing Skills Are Important in Life
Due to the development of the above transferable and critical thinking skills, it’s no wonder so many schools and employers want to see writing samples from their applicants.
Writing skills are THAT important for academics AND career—and the key skill linked to student (and career) success.
For much more information, visit collegereadywriting.com. Download my FREE Mini-Course What Is College-Ready Writing (& Why Does It Matter?) here and watch my FREE Masterclass 3-Step System to Help Your Teen Crush College Academics (and Avoid First-Year Flame-Out) here.
William Bryant, PhD is the President and Co-Founder of BetterRhetor Resources, an educational publishing and services company he and his wife Becky operate headquartered in Prescott, Arizona.
Dr. Bryant has created collegereadywriting.com and authored his premium College Success Accelerator program, his signature online resource, College-Ready Writing Essentials, as well as several other paid and free resources designed specifically to target the college-readiness gap.
He has written for Getting Smart, Curmudgication, and Bright Magazine. and worked for a decade at ACT Inc., lastly as Director of Writing Assessments where he spearheaded the redesign of the current ACT Writing Test.
In addition to college readiness, Dr. Bryant writes about education, equity, democracy—and how they fit together on his American Educator blog. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
