For many people writing can be very frustrating. There are time limits, length requirements, formats to follow and grammar to deal with. This can make a student come to fear writing an essay. Low-stakes writing is very unstructured and flexible. They are short so time is not really a problem. Since the focus of these assignments is mostly content, a student doesn’t have to worry about grammar. Low-stakes writing gives any person the opportunity to get comfortable with putting their thoughts out there. It is where a student can get discover his or her voice as a writer. The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities website talks about this particular benefit in their article Benefits of Low Stakes Writing:
Low stakes writing helps students find their own language for the issues of the course; they work out their own analogies and metaphors for academic concepts. Learning a discipline means learning its discourse, but it also means learning not to use that discourse. That is, students don't know a field until they can write and talk about what's in the textbook and the lectures in their own lingo, in their informal, "home" or "personal" language that is saturated with