USAToday has an interesting, but not really surprising, bit of figures today about writing in college. Many first year students would be keen to note that on average they write 92 pages of information throughout the first year. As time goes on, the number exponentially changes to being 146 pages when they’re a senior. So if you’re looking at four years of schooling, this is somewhere near 368 pages of content throughout the scholastic career. However, it should be noted that this is not exactly a bad thing.
‘Those findings provide “solid evidence that writing in college is associated with the kinds of learning that professors and higher-education institutions say they believe is most significant,” says Chuck Paine, a University of New Mexico English professor and member of the Council of Writing Program Administrators’
So it turns out that all this writing is actually good for students. The techniques involved in writing revolve around providing analysis and the synthesis of multiple ideas and viewpoints into one coherent paper. This is the type of higher education that Paine is alluding to in his quote, saying that students should be able to achieve higher level thinking in college institutions. With all the stories coming out today of how American students are not getting the same quality of education as the past, this study is certainly refreshing to see.
