Language is the backbone of our society. We are all programmed to be able to learn how to speak a language and we use it every day. Writing, on the other hand, is not as natural. It’s a learned skill and that’s exactly what makes it so important. Everyone knows how to speak, but not everyone knows how to write, let alone how to write well or how to write for fun. It’s an “extra” that empowers us to do more, whether that’s in our professional or personal lives. When we learn just how much writing can benefit us, we gain a superpower. Below are three ways you can use this power in your everyday life.
- writing as a career skill
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I only have a few more semesters left of college and then it’s off into the real world. It’s daunting. Pretty soon I will be expected to be able to “do” all of the things I have been learning about. On top of this, everyone has advice on how to make a smooth transition from learner to doer. The one thing that I hear from everyone — family, friends, teachers, business owners, etc. — is “you need to know how to write well.”
For someone studying the humanities at a university where the sciences reign supreme, it’s not often that I hear the arts being praised for their marketability. People are advising that we know how to write well because not everyone takes the time to develop that skill. In college, the majority of our classes are geared toward the things we will have to be able to do in our careers. Engineers learn how to build machines. Scientists learn how to use the tools in labs. Athletic trainers learn how to train people. Of course, writers learn how to write. Writing is not only imperative for those who hope to make a career out of it. As much as it isn’t focused on in every major, every job requires you to be a decent writer.
So much of our communication is written. I would bet that we have more conversations over text and email than we do face-to-face every day. That’s only augmented in the workplace. In every job, you will have to send out written messages or reports. These communications are so you can keep everyone in the loop, ask someone to do something, or ask questions. It’s the people who are able to do these things well who can do their jobs more effectively. You have to be clear in your messages, write for the audience who is receiving them, and know what information needs to be written where and to who. If you can do these things well, then it makes the other aspects of your job easier because you have been able to communicate with the other people involved. Better yet, it becomes so much easier for your colleagues to see how good you are at your job when they aren’t sifting through confusing and scattered messages.
- Writing as therapy
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Writing for yourself can be extremely therapeutic. A lot of people journal as a way to work through their emotions. What’s great about this form of writing is that it can look any way you want it to because it’s personal, nobody else has to see it. You can use a bullet journal to jot down quick notes and add lots of illustrations. Words can be everywhere on the page, or neatly organized into paragraphs. No matter how you choose to write in your journal, writing enables you to take the thoughts out of your mind, an abstract place and put them on paper, a physical place. Physically seeing the words in front of you that were swimming around in your mind can help you process them. They become separate from you, and that little bit of distance between yourself and your thoughts can make room to understand them more fully.
Also, because writing makes speech and thoughts permanent, you can look back on your entries to learn things about yourself. Maybe you’ve been trying out different forms of writing to see what works best for you. Maybe you’ve been keeping track of how you work through certain problems and can refer back to those processes when similar problems arise. Or, maybe you can even find patterns in your entries to help you identify stressors or things that help you destress. When you journal and write down your thoughts, you make a record of them, and this record can help you do so many things to create the mental space you are working towards.
- writing as creativity
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Of course, I have to talk about the creative aspect of writing. There’s something so special about being able to create your own world to live in for a little while. Writing stories or poems help you let go of the “real” world and allows your imagination to run wild. Some might call this escapism, and maybe it is in a way, but we all do things to escape reality. The world is hard, but even on a cold and gloomy winter day, we can still feel the first warm rain of spring sprinkle on our faces.
One thing I’ve heard about writing is that you can write about what you know, but it can be more fruitful to write about what you don’t know. You can write about things you don’t understand as a way to make sense of them. You don’t always have time to ask questions, mostly you’re expected to just understand what’s going on, or at least understand what’s going on enough to keep moving forwards. Writing gives you that time to mull over what may have been confusing. You can do this with characters that are separate from yourself, again creating that space that allows you to see things from all angles. Writing what you don’t know also lets you explore all the possibilities the world has to offer. You can be anyone and do anything when you’re writing. There’s nothing else quite as freeing as writing. When you start to see those possibilities, they become more real to you and the world may open up just a little bit more.
This list is not exhaustive of all the positive ways knowing how to write can benefit your life. Writing is a skill that we all constantly improve on. It’s one of those things you never stop learning how to do better. More importantly, it’s one of those things you never stop doing. If you take the time to integrate more writing into your life, then you will get better at it, and maybe even learn to love it as I did. I hope you start to write more or at least start to appreciate it more because it’s one of the most important skills you can gain at any point in your life. And once you start to see writing as a skill that you can use, it becomes your superpower.