The plan boiled down to the following: Make students write more all through the core, and improvement will follow. It really wasn’t a bad premise. But reading samples of student papers semester after semester, I wasn’t sure it quite delivered. Why not? I have four reasons to propose here that are relevant to the rest of us.

The best writers read a lot—and they read a lot of good writing. Unfortunately, the students at the state university where I was teaching were not reading much. They struggled to get through fifty pages of reading per week in introductory history classes. And many sections of the introductory English classes had moved away from assigning much reading—because the students weren’t doing the reading.

The best writers love beauty—and this connects to #1. A life filled with the joy of good books, family, friendships, nature, church, art of various sorts is going to be a life that lends itself to the pursuit of good writing as well. But so many of my former students had never been to a museum. Not once—as I discovered when I offered a paper option that required visiting a museum and writing about it. This is a reminder that such beauty is a privilege, and unfortunately, not everyone receives it.

Motivation is essential—in other words, to improve one’s writing, the desire for improvement is crucial. The desire alone won’t make it happen, of course. But a lack of desire is unlikely to lead to improvement. Students who completed the required writing assignments just to get through those assignments, and who were not interested in improving their writing—well, it showed. So, to improve one’s writing, one must think of it as more than just a utilitarian means to an end—the way to get through a paper, a class, college, graduate school, a career.

Improvement takes time, growth, and maturity. Writing is an art, and one cannot will art out of thin air, at the snap of one’s fingers. This is a process. Except, as a society, we’re more conditioned than ever towards immediate gratification. If we’re not good at something right off the bat, we decide that we’re just not good at it, and why bother. That’s sad—especially because in this age of AI the world needs good writers more than ever. Why? Because AI is not a good writer. And this brings us to a rather loaded question.

Become a Better Writer: Part I