Opinion: Foundational Writing Skills Are More Critical Than Ever
September 30, 2025
Why should we learn to write?
This question has had a clear answer for a long time, but with the proliferation of generative AI, many have opened it up for debate again. Recent studies have shown that 80-90% of college students are using AI for academic work. As ChatGPT and other generative AI tools inch their way up towards universal academic usage, educators, administrators, parents, and students alike are wondering—and debating—how to best integrate this technology into higher education.
While there are myriad ways that students (and faculty) are now using AI, the flashpoint issue has been about writing education. If a student asks it to, AI can quickly and easily construct coherent and seemingly logical prose. Given that reality, is the college essay still a relevant method for education and assessment? Educators have come down on all sides of the issue, with some arguing that foundational writing skills are still necessary, and others arguing that they are obsolete, or at the very least in need of adapting with the times.
The Relationship Between Writing & Thinking
Part of this debate rests on what you think the point of writing education is. One could make the argument that education in general—and college education in particular—has been reduced to a market. Degrees are nothing but commodities; a means to an end. If you consider basic writing skills (composition, rhetoric, and research) to be academic boxes to check, each essay simply an assignment for a grade, each grade for a degree, the degree a requirement for a job, and so on, then writing becomes a transaction. Not a subject, but an object—just one of many—to use and discard in one’s climb up the ladder of success.
But this isn’t why we learn. And it isn’t why we write. No—the real point of developing one’s writing skills is to develop one’s thinking skills.
The process of writing and the process of thinking are closely linked. A wide array of writers and intellectuals, from William Faulkner to Flannery O’Connor to Stephen King, have put their spin on this same basic idea. Joan Didion, National Book Award-winning author and journalist, said it particularly memorably: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”
Most of us may not end up writing books for a living, but the lesson still applies.
When we ask a question, conduct research, and attempt to write about it, the ultimate value is not in the answer itself as much as it’s in the process of figuring out the answer. This is why something critical is lost when we offload or shortcut that journey of questioning and finding. In the exploratory process of learning to write well, we test the mettle of our ideas. Writing is a crucible: by attempting to put our thoughts into a logical progression in order to communicate them clearly to someone else, we find out where the weak spots are, or whether the ideas make sense at all. By taking the time to understand the stakes, the dead ends, and the counterarguments, we build for ourselves a stronger ground to stand on in defense of our own ideas.
Why Master the Basics of Writing?
A knowledge of the basics matters regardless of what we are doing. Mastery of any field—an academic subject, a profession, a hobby, a sport, or an art form—relies on an understanding of the fundamentals.
Math students study arithmetic, algebra, and trigonometry in order to lay the groundwork for more complex mathematical inquiry. It is through knowing and understanding those basics that someone might go on to find the solution for an as-yet-unsolved mathematical problem.
Aspiring athletes learn the rules of their game, study the greats that came before them, and practice plays and maneuvers over and over, so that when they step on the field, they are fully prepared to make decisions and improvise at a moment’s notice, when it counts.
This is how the study of writing functions too—as a scrimmage with one’s own thoughts, and the thoughts of others. Except, unlike those other specialities, you don’t have to grow up to be a professional author, a literature professor, or a public orator for your writing skills to matter. Language and communication are fundamental to human life, to career, community, and family. It is more than our backbone, it is our entire skeleton. Language is the basis on which human society and all of its interlocking systems and relationships rests.
We think in language. And if we want to communicate those thoughts, or explain ourselves, share an opinion, or express a feeling—we must translate that mental process into words. When an infant cries, we can deduce that something is wrong, but anything past that is an educated guess, a process of trial and error. But when a child learns to express themself in words—No! or Wait! or Hungry! or Help!—suddenly, there is communication. As we get older, and our language skills get more sophisticated and complex, the potential for clarity and depth increases, but also, paradoxically, so does the potential for misunderstanding. Language is a tool, like a knife or a coil of rope: strong, precise, sturdy, flexible, but with the capacity for harm resting right alongside the capacity for sustenance or repair.
This is where writing comes in.
Unlike direct and instantaneous communication like speech, writing requires us to slow down, to sit in the messiness of our mental process, wrestle with the words, and draw out our ideas, clearly, precisely, and logically, to their conclusions. Writing requires reading too, not only reading our own words in the process of revision, but reading other people’s words, and deciding what we think about them. Fortunately, we have centuries of literature, criticism, reportage, philosophy, political thought, and personal writing to draw from, to learn from, to agree and disagree with. And we have the opportunity, when we write, to add something to that massive body of human work.
Writing: Our Key to Understanding Each Other
Especially now, in an ever-more-fractured world, developing these foundational writing skills is critical. Not only so we can argue better—although that is part of it—but so we can listen better, and understand each other better. When we know what we think, and why we think it, when we’ve had to articulate our own opinions, thought processes, and rationalizations, we can better understand how other people arrived at their own conclusions. What their biases and blind spots might be, or where they’ve made a connection we missed. We are better equipped to suss out misinformation from fact, to ask thoughtful questions and to draw well-researched and well-reasoned conclusions.
When we leave the bulk of our thinking up to other people—or worse, the thoughts of other people spliced and regurgitated through an algorithm—we are giving our strongest (and most dangerous) tool away. We become easier to bamboozle, frighten, and manipulate. The question of why, and whether, we write is more than an educational question: it’s an existential one.
Generative AI was built on human writing (whether we consented to it or not). But while AI has been trained to spot patterns and find similarities in vast libraries that no one person could ever read, the words it consumes are only ever data, and it is only ever digesting the past. It cannot look forward, or make anything new. It can only echo, in ever-diminishing strength, what came before. It cannot think, and it cannot create new ideas.
But we can. And that is why we write.
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