By the time we get to college, writing can seem like a tedious, frustrating, and potentially dull task for many of us. While I’m not one of these people, I can understand their perspective.

When we dig past all of the dull topics and restrictions from our high school assignments and come back to the simple task of writing for enjoyment or to write an essay on a topic that interests us, or to analyze a thought provoking text or other media, we can see the potential we can gain from writing and the thinking that's involved.

At its core, writing is making sense of all the thoughts bouncing around in our heads and in some semblance of order, getting them down on paper. This teaches us the skills of conciseness and clarity when communicating our thoughts onto paper. It also has the potential to teach the importance of the order and placement of words and how those words sound to your audience and their potential perspectives. Which then teaches us to be aware of our audience and perspectives that differ from our own. In reality this list just keeps on going. Writing has the potential to teach us so many things, simply from us compiling our thoughts onto paper for ourselves and/or others to read.

When you bring analysis into writing, it’s teaching potential becomes exponential. When analyzing a text or other media, you have to pay attention to details and double meanings within that text. You’re developing a unique skill set. This skill set is further developed when you have to clearly and concisely express your analysis where others can read and understand it. This then positively impacts how articulate and understandable your writing is. Writing analyses of text also hones our creativity because we use the ability to think outside the box about how we interpret certain texts. We also learn new things and conceive new ideas through the process of writing as we research, analyze, and enjoy different texts.

Writing also helps us learn more about ourselves. The stances we take on certain topics, our perspectives as writers, how we put our thoughts into words, how we describe different things, our impressions on different works, all of these instances are ways that writing can impart knowledge of ourselves upon us.

Writing can also help us figure out what we do and don’t know both about ourselves and other topics. Many people believe that all the characters they conceive have at least a very small part of their own personality within them, because we're writing what we know, and if we know anything it should be ourselves, right?

Writing has this amazingly huge potential that we can choose to utilize by simply writing more and about a wider range of topics. Writing improves our critical thinking skills, and thought processes and we can totally take advantage of that, or can ignore it and the power and influence that writing has over ourselves and others.