Why Is Writing Important?

For my annotated bibliography, I am hoping to find out if traditional writing still has a place in society today. To answer this, I decided to first try to understand why traditional writing matters at all. Once I figure this out, I hope to apply my answer to the multimodal/monomodal debate we've been discussing in class.

This article I found by Steve Graham (called "Writing: Importance, Development and, Instruction") discusses the importance of traditional writing and provides an overview of how teachers can effectively help their students become better writers. Graham begins "Writing: Importance, Development and Instruction" by acknowledging the near universal lack of writing education in our world today, saying "In many countries, little time is devoted to teaching writing or using writing as a tool to support learning" (1). In the U.S., in particular, Graham claims that after third grade, students are taught very little about writing. This serves as a backdrop for Graham's following arguments about why writing should be taught in more frequent and in-depth ways. Because he believes that the ability to write well is important for pretty much anyone, he laments the lack of instruction students receive in this discipline in school.

The author then discusses why writing is such an important skill for you, your grandma, your neighbor, and your best friend's uncle to develop. At a personal level, Graham says writing "provides a medium for maintaining personal links with family, friends, and colleagues," and allows people "to create imagined worlds, tell stories, share information, explore who they are, combat loneliness, and chronicle their experiences" (3). This, he says, is psychologically beneficial for people, because it allows them to develop and uphold personal relationships and process and express emotions and ideas.

In addition, he believes writing is "a powerful tool for influencing others" (3). He cites examples of famous historical pieces of writing that impacted large numbers of people, and argues that writing is an excellent mechanism for persuasion.

Finally, he argues that a writing education is an "indispensable tool for learning" because it improves reading comprehension (3). This can be applied to all areas of study, which extends writing's importance from the confines of the English classroom to the school at large.

Graham then goes into how writing skills can best be developed and taught. He has many suggestions for this, but one of the most interesting and relevant ones (to my topic, at least) is to get students to write frequently and for long periods of time (8). Graham discusses some scientific studies that were conducted on excellent writing teachers that found these techniques to be particularly effective. In addition, he believes that focusing on the overall writing process, in particular, on "writing skills, strategies, and knowledge" will "serve as catalysts to students’ overall writing development" (11).

So, overall, this article is useful to me because it helps me begin to understand why writing matters in the average person's daily personal, professional, and educational life. Hopefully, I can find some other good sources that help me apply these concepts to the discussion about the changing writing environment and answer whether traditional alphabetic writing still is something that matters.

Article URL: http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.scu.edu/docview/1270350174?accountid=13679

Citation: Graham, Steve, Amy Gillespie, and Debra Mckeown. "Writing: Importance, Development, and Instruction." Reading and Writing 26.1 (2013): 1-15.ProQuest. 28 Apr. 2016 .