Why Writing is the Most Important Thing You Can Learn

I had a professor who always said that the ability to write well is the most important skill a person can develop. Okay, you caught me; he was my writing teacher. But he’s certainly not the only one with that opinion. As I've made the transition from student to alumna and now to employee, I’ve heard it echoed again and again.

In fact, I was recently in a job interview with a TV station’s assistant news director when he said almost that exact thing.  He told me that no matter what you want to do in life, a solid background in writing will always get you farther, faster. Since it was the context of the interview, I'll take local news as an example. If you want to be an anchor, you have to start as a reporter – and for that, you need to be able to write news stories well. If you want to work in station promotions, you have to be able to write on-air promos well. Becoming a news producer or an assignment editor requires daily writing and editing.  And there are the news writers for whom it's their whole life.

A promotions producer once informed me that in a world where computers can be taught almost anything, writing careers will be safe. And he’s right. A quick look around the station where I work shows computers taking over more and more jobs – did you know there aren’t even studio camera operators anymore? All of the studio cameras are run by a single robotics operator using one computer and some kind of joystick. 

But computers becoming writers? Even if you can teach a computer the rules of grammar and how to string together nouns and verbs, can you really teach it how to write? “Write” as in craft a story, captivate an audience, motivate someone to do something? If that’s ever possible, I’m afraid we mere mortals are going to be in for a very bumpy ride.