In my years of teaching composition to college students, I have discovered that one of the main obstacles to their learning the skills I teach is their conviction that those skills are nice to have, but not essential--unless, of course, they plan a career that is likely to require them to write a lot. Most students would like to write easily and well, but they do not feel an overwhelming need to.

As it happens, however, writing essays is one of the best ways to develop the mental skills necessary for learning and thinking. Despite the widely held belief that human beings are rational animals, the fact is that we are no such thing--at least not naturally. What we are is capable of rational thought. We have the capacity to learn how to reason, but that capacity does not come to fruition without careful nurturing. Just as the skilled athlete has, through diligent effort and application, honed physical capacities that are inherent but not well developed in most human beings, so the skilled thinker has studied and trained himself to apply mental skills in a manner beyond the reach of most untrained minds.

The exercise of rational thought or procedure to analyze a subject and to express in an orderly way the judgments arrived at through such analysis is called "discourse." Writing which aims to arrive at an understanding of a subject--or to make such an understanding possible for the reader by leading him through the steps of rational analysis of that subject--is called "discursive" writing.

Virtually all of the writing required of a student in high school or college should be discursive, and it is a truly unfortunate trend that highly personal and so-called "creative" writing has often been allowed to replace discursive writing in much of the curriculum. The function of training in discursive writing is to enable the student to learn