The Globe and Mail reports on essay writing skills with comments by Associate Dean, Undergraduate Programs, Katherine Acheson:
Even in an age of quick-bite digital communication, writing skills are key because they can be transferred to any number of other forms, including a song, a sales pitch, or even a profile on a dating site.
Long-form essay writing isn’t a dying skill. It’s just as relevant and important as another complex study on the human condition: Beyoncé’s Lemonade.
Her point is that Beyoncé album on life as a young woman “is a rich mass of information that is organized in a way that you can’t avoid feeling it. You can’t avoid knowing more after you’ve gone through it.” And this is the very definition of well-crafted essay writing, and that same clarity and organization of thought is why essay skills remain the cornerstone of a university education.
Even in an age of social media and seemingly minute attention spans, educators insist that essay writing will never go the way of mandatory Latin, despite those students who gripe that they will never have to write an essay in their working life, so why spend so much time on it in university?
The reason is because “an essay belongs in the same category as a sales pitch, or a profile on a dating site, or a map, or a website, or a video game,” Dr. Acheson argues. “If an essay is a complex and advanced form of organized information, then mastering the essay will help you do all those different kinds of communication better.” [...]