what does writing help with

what does writing help with

The Benefits of Writing

1. Improved Communication Skills

Another way to improve communication skills through writing is by publicizing or sharing the writing. One can improve on eloquence and being able to linguistically present an idea to a wide range of an audience. By being published or sharing the writing, a person can earn tendencies to vocabulary and language which can be vital in articulating the writing to a wide variety of audience. Through all publishing, it assists in building rhetoric styles, and also how effective the writing is for the targeted audience. With rhetoric style and effectiveness, it all leads to persuasiveness and confidence, two other vital speaking skills. Confidence in speaking and persuasion often come through excellent understanding of the subject and a well delivery in language. With all the gained skills from writing publicized, it is helping the individual to become a more successful communicator.

Academic writing, like the five-paragraph essay, letter to the editor, book report, or laboratory report, to name just a few, usually demands that a writer clearly state and support a thesis. Deciding upon the thesis (which also may be called the topic idea) is the first step in composing a paper that meets the demands of the assignment and for most all writing. Expectations for tone, argument, and other rhetorical factors are set by the communication situation. Differing from creative essays or research papers, academic writing is formal and offers an attempt to communicate information or ideas in a dispassionate way, written with a tone that may range from convivial to detached.

2. Enhanced Critical Thinking Abilities

The evaluation phase can be improved in depth and breadth through the version of “considering all possibilities.” Writing in an essay ensures that you are considering all possible options or alternate theories. It will be reflected in your essay if you missed out on an important bit of the evaluation. Remember to be critical but avoid being hasty or impulsive. A good thinker remains open-minded to the possibility that the essay may fail. At this point, it is an added benefit to a writing exercise to compile a preliminary thesis.

This simply means that you should think about whether you are actually interested in or disinterested in any subject, and why. Many people can easily combine the remembering and understanding part of thinking with the evaluating part, but writing makes it black and white, right or wrong. It makes you no longer accept the grey area, which is a great benefit of critical thinking.

3. Increased Self-Reflection and Personal Growth

Gains in personal growth include increased insightfulness, reflection quality, open-mindedness, and an ability to change one’s perspective. These qualities are fostered through the use of various writing exercises and personal reflections. Insightfulness and increased reflection quality can be seen through the establishment of a concrete relation between reflection and writing, intuitive thinking, and self-awareness, which are critical components of insight and reflection. An open-minded approach and ability to change perspectives can also be enhanced through reflecting on judgment in writing. Writing reflections forces individuals to ponder reasons for their judgment and the implications of these judgments. This is essential to being open-minded and also reveals veiled biases and assumptions which may be inhibiting personal growth. By reflecting on the judgment in written form, one can spot the errors in their logic and may change their perspective on an issue. The benefits of increased insightfulness, reflection quality, open-mindedness, and changing perspectives are transferable skills which can be applied to any personal or professional issue to result in optimal decision making and increased understanding.

According to the University of Texas, the act of writing fosters an individual’s communication skills, self-expression, and cognitive growth. The process of writing enables an individual to introspect and explore intricate ideas, which promotes the creation of new connections and perspectives. This active exploration then leads to an increased understanding of the writer’s own thoughts, which increases levels of personal growth. Out of 372 students interviewed, the Harvard students provide the first large-scale quantitative evidence that frequent writing contributes to the intellectual development of college students. One of the Harvard researchers stated, “By the time they are seniors, we would expect that those who write more would have higher gains in their skills of critical thinking and written communication.” Through the improvement of these essential skills, the student is not only improving academically but also personally, as these skills can be translated into numerous aspects of their lives.

4. Strengthened Memory and Cognitive Function

One of the more overlooked benefits of writing is the fact that it can actually strengthen your memory and enhance your cognitive function. With the increase in technology constantly feeding us information, we no longer have to remember things, we can simply search for them online. This would be a great help in the short term, but with all the information that is forgettable, we have created a habit of not storing it long term in our memory. For example, phone numbers – it is very hard to find someone these days who actually remembers a variety of phone numbers. They are normally just stored into a phone and never thought of again. This type of memory is called transactive memory. How this way of living comes unstuck is when we become older and our transactive memory starts to decrease because we are not consistently using our memory to remember things. But by writing things down, we are exercising our intrinsic memory, which is the internal storage of remembered information, and this is what keeps our brain more active and also keeps our memories strong. By improving your memory and cognitive function and becoming less reliant on technology, it will greatly assist those making studies or work their chosen profession as it is still currently expected to remember and recall more information if you are in a higher or professional field of work.

5. Boosted Creativity and Imagination

An increase in imagination can improve other tasks that require more direct skills. When we imagine, we are essentially creating something out of nothing. We are applying the skill of invention. This is a useful exercise for the invention of various tools and solutions for any profession. Becoming better at creating fiction may help scientists in creating hypotheses. Brainstorming is a use of creative thinking to produce multiple ideas on a single topic before narrowing them down to the best ones. Techniques learned, such as mind mapping, can be used for an array of tasks such as planning, research, and essay writing.

Essentially, anything that requires using our minds to invent and produce is an act of creativity. It is a skill that branches into every aspect of our lives in one way or another. Without creativity, problem-solving would be a very difficult task. When imagining directly leads to problem-solving abilities, e.g. when planning something, taking a mental walk through the steps is a way of imagining it. This method is used to prepare for the worst or think of preventative measures for a best-case scenario.

As mentioned in the first section of this piece, writing is an incredibly creative outlet. There’s the obvious: stories, plays, poetry, lyrics. But there are so many other ways to be creative with writing. Descriptions, opinions, articles, journal entries, letters, and writing from one photograph to create various characters and stories are just as much a part of writing as they are any other type of text.