How Much Do You Write in College?
Writing is possibly the most important skill to develop if you want to do well in college—and I am not only speaking for English majors. During the last two years, I have kept nearly every single piece I have written for a class in the same folder on my computer. Surprisingly, I was required to write more in my Biology 102 class than for any writing class I have taken.
The Numbers
- Essays: 55
- Letters: 2
- Speeches: 3
- Projects: 9
- Poems: 6
- Stories: 1
- Pages: 233 (usually double spaced)
- Words: 50,512
- Most written for a single class: 7 essays for History 103
(Additionally, it seems that two ten page essays, one four page essay, one speech, everything written for two online literature classes, and several other assignments are missing. I can only guess that some of them were not saved to my computer, and the rest were deleted happily after the term was over. I also have yet to write 8-10 other essays this term.)
The Breakdown
So, in two years of undergraduate education I have probably written at least 250 pages if you take into account the missing essays. By the time I graduate, it will be 500 pages or more. Most likely, it will be more, since I will be taking more upper division courses and they will be almost exclusively English and Writing. I also calculated the averages of each subject I have taken. I averaged five essays per class in Biology, while in every other subject (including English, Writing, and History) I only averaged three. Writing, strangely enough, was a huge portion of my grade in each of the Biology classes I have taken.
At least at my college, writing seems to matter quite a bit. For anyone who wants to do well in college, writing is going to be an extremely important skill. Your writing is sometimes the only way you communicate to your professor that you have mastered the material in the course. If you have the knowledge, but not the skills with which you can communicate it, your grades will probably suffer.
Sitenote
I’m really amused by the fact that I’ve written the equivalent of one NaNoWriMo novel in the past two years of college, so I decided to throw all of my fiction together in one file and calculate that as well. Between NaNoWriMo, several small pieces, and one other half finished off-season NaNo-style novel, I have also written 305 pages (sometimes double spaced) or 80,959 words of extracurricular fiction.
Photo Credit: Christgr at Stock Xchng.
About the Author
Shawna is a twenty-something year old English major living in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, Matthew. She enjoys reading old books, writing novels in a month, listening to Regina Spektor, watching British TV shows with her husband, making tasty treats, exploring Portland with her friends, making self discoveries and blogging about her adventures as a college student. Find the author on the web at http://www.eruantale.net/.
