Do I Have To Write That?

What I call "required writing" is writing that we have to do, writing that someone else is demanding from us. Required writing (in the form of academic papers) is the primary demand made of students in humanities and social science courses in college. Required writing (in the form of memos, reports, presentations, and so on) is also a major part of many people’s daily work. Unlike writing we choose to do, which we can often linger over, writing we have to do almost always hems us in with deadlines: required writing is writing we may not want do, but that must get done.

Although we may dread required writing tasks, and spend more time procrastinating than actually doing them, the truth is that these tasks provide us with opportunity for building our writing skills.

One of the best ways to approach required writing projects, then, is to see them as opportunities for learning through practice. At the same time, the more we strengthen our skills by engaging in writing practice, the easier it becomes to get our work done.

Most required writing projects are not all that difficult. They often feel difficult because we don't know how to do them. But we can learn how.

Most adults were taught to write within an educational system that focused all attention on the product of writing: the finished piece. Very few of us were taught anything at all about how to produce that finished piece. It's that ignorance about what we are supposed to be doing as we write that creates so much anxiety and fear about writing. So if you find yourself panicking or struggling when faced with a required writing project, don't take it personally. You, like so many others, are simply being faced with a task that you don't know how to do. You are probably also handicapped by a common assumption about how writers work, which we'll examine in the next lesson.

For now, I encourage you to begin here, with an assessment of what you know about how to produce a piece of required writing:

PRACTICE: HOW DO YOU WRITE?

Use freewriting (see the lesson How To Be a Writer if you are unfamiliar with freewriting) to describe how you typically work on a piece of required writing. What do you do? Which of the activities you engage in as you write do you find helpful? Which ones are not helpful?

Suggested next lesson: Understanding the Writing Process