Beyond the Research Paper

When’s the last time you wrote something significant? Was it in a long ago educational setting like high school or college?

We’ve come to think of writing as something we suffer through in our learning years, but thankfully get to shed when we’re done, but as a college writing instructor, I can tell you that writing is so much more than a research paper. In college writing courses, the ultimate goal is to teach you to write specific types of texts so you can be successful in your writing career. In my classes, I focus on teaching students how to use writing and reading to think critically and structure their thoughts, skills which are useful in an educational setting, but also somewhere else: Life.

When I ask people where they think writing and reading originated from, most point to oral storytelling and a belief that writing came about as a way to document epic journeys like Beowulf or some other long oral tradition from Greek, but actually, writing originated in this year out of the practical need to document inventory. The first types of writings were actually small figures farmers would create out of clay, which represented how much sheep or wheat they had, so they could have that information available to them when they went to the market. Because these small figures became hard to tow around, the figures involved into characters written on a clay tablet. For several centuries after that, writing continued to be a way of documenting available goods. It wasn’t until this time that people began to use the characters to document stories. 

Writing is not just a creative tool, it is also a real-life practical tool and I’m sure you use it every day in this realm. You might write lists, organize a meal plan, schedule items in a calendar and I’m sure you write messages to friends and family. Writing continues to be a practical tool, but our time in writing classes may have led us to believe that writing beyond the lists, is only reserved for educational settings, but writing can still help us to think critically and organize our thoughts in a way that can be useful and sometimes life changing. 

Creative writing is certainly one place where we can use writing as a critical thinking tool. I’m not a very good poet, but I’ve written several poems about my children or time with my children and doing so has led me to think a bit more deeply about who they are and why they are important to me. I will likely not ever publish these poems and may not even show them to my children, but the time I took to think about them in this way has opened my understanding of who they are and that has positively affected my time with them. Here are other ideas you can use to write creatively:

• Write a short story about an important family memory or moment

• Write a narrative essay describing an important event in your life and what you learned from it

• Write character descriptions about the important people in your life, how would you describe them to someone who doesn’t know them?

• Write a short memoir of somewhere or someone that was important to you in your formative years. If you feel like sharing, you could add videos and narrating it with a slide presentation.

Another way of using writing beyond educational writing is to find way to use your words to uplift and inspire others. You could:

• Write thank you notes on real paper

• Write notes to troops 

• Write a positive message and post it on social media or send it in a text to your family and friends.

Of course, we can also use writing to help us think through big decisions and events in our lives. One good way to do this is in a journal. There are many ways to use a journal, but one of the most helpful ways is to use it to think through situations in your life. Write about what you’re grateful for, what is hard for you and detail your thoughts about life. Somehow, in the act of getting your thoughts out of your head and onto the paper, you can find the solutions to complex problems you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. In fact, research has shown that you can use journaling as a way to overcome even major traumas in your life. Describe the research here.

No one is asking you to turn in any papers, but I hope you see that writing can be a useful tool.