The world over, college students write essays on complex topics. What is the value of essay assignments in college, besides the natural, inherent consequence that the essay enables a student to achieve academic outcomes and pass the course or go to a baccalaureate or graduate university?
The skill of crafting an excellent essay will make students into better communicators, wielding intricate knowledge of how to get their points across in a professional setting. Learning how to write an engaging essay, and tuning the process again and again, will help aspiring writers enjoy writing and responding to others’ feedback on their works. After all, practice makes perfect — especially if the student has an ambition to become a writer.
College is half about improving skills related to the subject in one's major and half about training for real life. Reflection on concepts referred to in class will help students to think for themselves, as opposed to regurgitating facts, dates, and assorted textbook tidbits or professor points in almost the same manner as a mother bird feeds its young. College students are well known for completing work by the due dates. With challenging assignments before them, they must complete their work accurately and efficiently while keeping a watchful eye on the anticipated deadline.
Before they even begin writing and answering questions in essay format for their assignments, they must closely listen to their professor's lecture, read nuanced articles, and copiously take note after note in their notebooks, which will doubtless become battered by the time ominous final exams loom near. Yet such an experience in which the student develops an essay will become a hirable trait for college and beyond. Quick deadlines are stepping stones to self-discipline.
The next step after high school, college is widely regarded as a ticket to independence. As Megan Mitchell astutely observed, “College is the best way to prolong reality and learn about the life beyond the parental units." Most college students are newly-minted adults, fully experiencing the real world as they had never experienced it before, and for the first time leaving parental dependence, authority, and supervision behind. Through escapades in campus and dorm life, through forging new friendships, they will learn everything they ever needed to know but were afraid to ask about “life beyond." Their difficult assignments and deadlines may be pertinent reminders that they are no longer children, and can now handle reality — the adult world as it really stands. As adults, they are “prolong[ing] reality” through challenging essay assignments, particularly assignments where the writer needs to defend an idea or proposal against counter-arguments.
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College assignments and the pacing of deadlines are intentionally challenging to develop a sense of accomplishment and ambition in students, as well as to prepare them for a real-life career where such writing will be their life's work. For college students and new graduates, the most career-focused value (and likely the highest cumulative reward) of an essay assignment is honing the writing skills needed to create articles and presentations for a job, then having a collection of writings. In at least one university, there is a book that began development as a student's senior capstone project. Commissioned assignments from certain jobs can be added to one's portfolio and used for writing samples on applications where they are needed. The skills of developing advanced essays are built in college and used to become an author, journalist or a different sort of writing professional. In the workplace, the employee must think for oneself and take on challenges using creativity and innovation. It takes synthesis of research and creativity to craft a well-written and engaging essay.
A required essay is an opportunity to improve the person and meaningfully enhance his or her interests, relationships, and values.
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