Why write?
Writing Table, American, 1795–1805, The Met Collection
Before beginning the writing assignments for the course, it is crucial to understand why we write in the first place. Pause and take a moment to ask yourself, "Why should I write in my courses at CUNY? Why should I write at all?"
Initially, you may have thought "Because I want to get good grades" or "I don't know why, I just have to because it is assigned." These thoughts are honest, and real, but also reduce the value of the question: Why should YOU write?
Writing is a key way to communicate with the world around you. Putting words on a page allows you to take up space with your thoughts, slow down your mind in a hyper-efficient, capitalist-driven society, and give meaning to your voice through critical thinking, publishing, sharing, and being a part of the discourse. Writing encourages creativity, imagination, focus, and hard work which can result in feeling connected to yourself and those around you, boost confidence, and teach you how to organize your thoughts more clearly.
Not only is writing important for you as a student, and something that can have a positive long-term impact on your interpersonal communication, professional goals, and intellectual development, but it is needed for the humanities to continue and flourish. The ultimate goal in writing in the humanities is to empirically understand human experience, which can expand and broaden in a multitude of ways. These perspectives, your perspective, live at the core of the pursuit of knowledge, and its propellant development. To put it another way, passing on knowledge, ideas, and worlds created by writing, are crucial to the development of humanity. This cannot happen without you.