why i write essay

Why I Write
People write for many reasons. Some write to learn about themselves, express themselves, or to educate others. Still others write in an attempt to create a permanent record of thoughts, or to create a fictional world that can be shared with their readers. For the most part, I have written and continue to write in order to get good grades. The focus on different aspects of the writing experience has changed as I have become older. In my freshman year of high school the main focus for my writing was to learn proper grammar and to limit my repetitions. The teacher told my class that as long as we showed improvement in grammar and used proper punctuation, we would get a good grade. To try to teach us how to write properly, he said that if we didn’t do well the first time, we would have to write the essay again. He forbade us from saying the same thing more than twice in a paragraph, and if we did, then we would not get a good grade. I did not write for fun, for self expression, and to share. I wrote for survival and the class grade. My sophomore year English composition class was very different from my freshman year. As opposed to my freshman year, my new teacher told us that he would grade us more on our creativity than on our grammar. Since my teacher told us to focus on our creativity more than anything else, the focus of my writing changed to trying to express myself to my best ability. Because of this new focus, my grammar suffered greatly, but I became better at the things that this teacher made us focus on. It did not take much to earn an “A” in creativity and because of this, I became very lazy. I would type four page papers the night before the essay was due, and I would be happy with a “B”. I would often debate putting in the extra work to reach for an “A”, but since I was lazy, that internal debate would never last very long. I fell back into my bad habits of repeating my words and thoughts’ and my awful middle school sentence structure returned. My junior year of high school probably reflected my worst year of writing, because I did not really have any motivations to write, and because my teacher let us write about whatever we wanted. She did not grade us on our grammar or the content. She just wanted to see that we put in an effort to get it done, and she would give a good grade. Her lack of attention to details just made me lazier, because it is not difficult for me to write a lot as long as I enjoy the subject.
My senior year was the same as my freshman, because I had the same teacher both years. This time around, we had a much smaller class, and this teacher was able to help everyone in the class improve their writing expression and reach our potential. As the year went on I felt myself enjoying the writing process more, and I think I became a better writer. My improvement as a writer showed in my other classes where I was using proper grammar and sentence structure. I still wrote because I had to, but I enjoyed the process more and felt that I was getting better at it.
The rules throughout high school were pretty obvious. When I was doing an English paper, I had to make sure to use proper vocabulary, punctuation, and proper sentence structure. However, when I was in my other classes, all I had to do was put coherent sentences together, and I knew I would be fine. For example, when I was preparing for my US history regents exam that heavily emphasized short essays, my teacher told us to worry only about using as much content as possible and not to focus on grammar. This helped a lot of us to do well on the regents, because we knew we would be graded on the content, and we did not have to worry about messing up on the grammar. Because I had not written a lot since high school graduation, I was afraid how my writing would compare to the other students in a college level composition class. However, since I am almost finished with my first semester in college, I now realize writing is a lot less nerve wracking than what I had thought earlier when I had just begun the class. The main difference between high school and college writing is that every single class in the general studies department now demands students employ proper grammar and punctuation. College standards for students writing are much higher than the standards for a high school student. In high school we got credit for our answers as long as the answers made sense, even if we did not express our thoughts properly. In college, however, I cannot just rely on getting the content right. I also have to use proper grammar. I am still committed to improving the structure of my writing, since it is quite clear that written expression is going to be very important during the duration of my college experience and in my future work as well. I hope to keep finding new motivations and to keep improving my writing for the rest of my life. In college I am now writing to educate, to explore ideas, and to learn more about myself. I try to educate people by writing about something I know a lot about and giving that composition to people who know less than I do about the subject. For example, I enjoy writing about sports in order to inform less knowledgeable people. I explore new ideas by writing about things that I know less about and trying to understand those subjects. This form of writing appears in my Judaic subjects such as philosophy. I try to learn more about myself by writing what is in my head without thinking about the subject matter too much. I find this is helpful in figuring out whether my ideas are good. Since I am looking to go into some type of business, I know that I am going to have to be able to develop a written argument. I am going to need to use writing to create a business plan, to impress people to invest in my business plan, and to convince people to buy my products or services. Business writing is a tool to educate customers and to convince prospective customers or investors to purchase or invest in the product that a business is selling. In the future it will be very important to express my ideas about business developments and possibilities. As George Orwell has said, “I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing”(Orwell, “Why I Write,”1946). George Orwell’s intentions in writing were political in nature, while mine will be economic, but we both recognize that the act of writing is an attempt to influence the beliefs of others and to change their behavior. In my case I will probably use my writing to convince people to believe in the quality of my product and to buy it. George Orwell recognized that what he was writing was often artistic propaganda, while my writing will more likely be a form of economic propaganda. Regardless of the job I get in the future, I know that being able to write properly will be important. A person needs to be able to write so that he can clearly express himself, so he can educate others, and often so that like George Orwell he can challenge other peoples’ point of view and convince those people of the correctness of the writer’s opinion. I think that challenging other peoples’ views is going to be the most important type of writing that I am going to have to do in business. In order to do so I have to form a convincing argument and write it down on paper. In an earlier essay I wrote about the importance of honesty and the sacredness of words and agreements. “In an ideal world, a person’s word would actually mean something” (Joseph Reinstein, 2011). The words I write in the future, whether they are in contracts or proposals or in other types of business documents, will have to be the truth as I see it. This has to hold even if I am trying to convince people to invest in or buy my product. If my written word can be trusted and depended upon, I am more likely to be successful in business. I may never be artistic writer like Joan Didion or a forceful writer like George Orwell, but I hope to be a persuasive one.
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Orwell, George “Why I Write”, 1946