The last couple of decades have laid a certain taboo on being a literature major. You walk through college hallways with people hurling accusations of laziness at you, a pariah in academic settings. Wallowing in self-pity, you are often left wondering, does literature hold any value anymore?

There are two answers to this. The first is the idealistic defense- there are, in fact, a multitude of people who care immensely about the relationships between romantic poets and the struggles of writing as a woman in the Victorian period. There are seminars held on the renaissance and clandestine groups devoted to worshipping Keats. Literature for its own sake is still alive and thriving in an underground community of writers, academics, philosophers and annoyingly enthusiastic students (me).

For the throngs rolling their eyes at that explanation, I’m going to lay out the practical defense. Sadly, as fascinating as the aforementioned content is, under most circumstances, it remains irrelevant in the ostensible “real world.” In comparison, engineering, econ, math and the whole shebang are considered lucrative because of the content they come equipped with. This perpetuates the notion that a lit major leaves college with no usable skills on entering the job market, which is an absolute lie.

Where the content of a literature class may seem obscure, useless even, the skills one picks up are essential to being an asset to most employers as well as a capable member of society. The moment one sets foot in an English class, one becomes more aware of language, of the appeal of argument, of the power of a single word. One starts creating connections that are invisible to the naked eye, and, more to the point, to the eye of the engineer, the mathematician, the economist. One learns to analyze in great detail and pick up on tiny details of language that indicate certain feelings or thoughts without the literality of actually coming out and saying them. But perhaps most relevant of all, one learns how to write.

Here’s a little secret everyone should know about writing: the best writing is the kind that is the most logical. Literature majors are often attributed “creativity and abstractness,” but are denied logic because that’s “more of a math thing” (all real things real people have said). This is a convenient, neatly tied up categorization that fails to take into account that without a sound argument, all writing is meaningless. English professors drill this into one’s head, reminding one that even the most embellished, aesthetically appealing work of writing is, at its core, an argument. As a result, learning how to write is really most about learning how to create a convincing, logically sound point of view, then present it coherently and engagingly to manipulate readers into believing every word. And is there any industry in the world that doesn’t require that?

Thankfully, employers are beginning to recognize this. It’s still a little more challenging for us humanities types; there is a rather obvious STEM bias that we have to overcome. But it’s getting easier. One of the most comforting statistics cited over and over is that while STEM graduates tend to make more money and have it much easier getting jobs in the first ten years post graduation, humanities graduates catch up at an astonishing rate in the years succeeding this. This comes from a flexibility associated with skill-based, rather than content-based learning. As a result, lit majors are spreading out, going into fields as divergent as finance and medicine. This is slowly breaking down the idea that the study of literature invariably leads one to a deadbeat job with a couple of unfinished, over ambitious novels rotting on the side.

Of course, as someone who chose her major not out of concern for the future, but rather out of love for the subject itself (we really do exist), these arguments are all just accompaniments to what matters most: the pure pleasure of reading. Enveloped in mounds of Woolf and Blake and Joyce, it’s hard to worry about the aforementioned “real world.” While I’ve learnt enough analytical skills from my major to help me navigate most industries with ease, I’ve also learnt to appreciate art, to understand cultures, to live vicariously in different times, through different people. And however idealistic it may sound, sometimes, that’s enough.