Before you start writing your essay, you will need to convince yourself that doing so is worthwhile. This is extremely important, because your aspiration and genuine belief in what you are doing will help organize your motivation and actions.
Most of the time, people write essays only because they are required to do so by a classroom instructor. They then come to believe that essays are important primarily to demonstrate their knowledge to a teacher or professor. This is not the case – and it runs the risk of depriving you of one of the most powerful tools at your disposal.
The primary reason to write an essay is so that the writer can formulate and organize an informed, coherent and sophisticated set of ideas about something important.
Why might it be important to bother with developing sophisticated ideas? It is because doing so is a form of thinking.
Writing is a psychological technology which has evolved to help us think abstractly. Writing extends your memory, facilitates editing and clarifies your thinking.
If you want to have a life characterized by competence, productivity, security, originality and engagement rather than one that is nasty, brutish and short, you need to think carefully about important issues. There is no better way to do so than to write – in fact, you cannot do so nearly as effectively without writing.
Consider this: you can write down far more than you can remember at one time. Writing therefore increases your capacity to consider a number of ideas at the same time.
Once those ideas are written down, you can move them around and change them, word by word, sentence by sentence, and paragraph by paragraph. You can reject ideas that don’t hold up to your careful scrutiny. If you do this, then all you will have left will be good ideas.
If you learn to write and to edit, you will also be able to tell the difference between good ideas, intelligently presented, and bad ideas put forth by murky and unskilled thinkers. Then you can be properly influenced by profound and solid ideas instead of falling prey to foolish fads and whims and ideologies, which can range in their danger from trivial to mortal.
If you can think and communicate, you can defend yourself, and your friends and family, when that becomes necessary, and it will become necessary at various points in your life.
The person who can formulate and communicate the best argument almost always wins. This is true in many of life’s domains. If you want a job, you have to make a case for yourself. If you want a raise, you have to convince someone that you deserve it. If you are trying to convince someone of the validity of your idea, you have to debate its merits successfully, particularly if there are others with other competing ideas.
Your mind is organized verbally, at the highest and most abstract levels. Thus, if you learn to think, through writing, then you will develop a well-organized, efficient mind – and one that is well-founded and certain. This also means that you will be mentally and physically healthier, as lack of clarity and ignorance means unnecessary stress.
So, unless you want to stay an ignorant, unhealthy lightweight, learn to write (and to think and communicate). Otherwise, those who can will ride roughshod over you and push you out of the way. Your life will be harder, at the bottom of the dominance hierarchies that you will inevitably inhabit, and you will get old fast.
Don’t ever underestimate the power of words. Without them, we would still be living in trees. So when you are writing an essay, you are harnessing the full might of culture to your life. That is why you write an essay (even if it has been assigned). Forget that, and you are doing something stupid, trivial and dull. Remember it, and you are conquering the unknown.