“Why write?” is an important basic question, especially today, when many people assume technology has eliminated the need to learn to write well. Obviously, writing enables you to communicate, but it also helps you think and learn, enhances your chances of success, contributes to your personal development, and strengthens your relationships.

Write to communicate effectively in different rhetorical situations.

Writing is a powerful means of communicating with diverse audiences in different genres and media. We use the term rhetorical situation to emphasize the fact that writing is social and purposeful. The rhetorical situation includes four interrelated factors:

Writing with an awareness of the rhetorical situation means writing not only to express yourself but also to reach out to your readers (audience) by engaging their interest and responding to their concerns. You write to influence how your readers think and feel about a subject and, depending on the genre, perhaps also to inspire them to action.

Writing with genre awareness affects your composing decisions—what you write about (subject choice), the claims you make (thesis), how you support those claims (reasons and evidence), and how you organize it all. Genres are simply ways of categorizing texts—for example, we can distinguish between fiction and nonfiction; subdivide fiction into romance, mystery, and science fiction genres; or break down mystery even further into hard-boiled detective, police procedural, true crime, and classic whodunit genres. Each genre has a set of conventions or basic features readers expect texts in that genre to use. Although individual texts within the same genre vary a great deal—for example, no two proposals, even those arguing for the same solution, will be identical—they nonetheless follow a general pattern that provides a certain amount of predictability. Without such predictability, communication would be difficult, if not impossible. But these conventional patterns should not be thought of as recipes. Conventions are broad frameworks within which writers are free to be creative. Most writers, in fact, find that working within a framework makes creativity possible. Depending on the formality of the rhetorical situation and the audience’s openness to innovation, writers may also play with genre conventions, remixing features of different genres to form new mash-ups, as you will see in the Playing with Genre sections of each Part One chapter.

Like genre, the medium in which you are working also affects many of your design and content choices. For example, written texts can use color, type fonts, charts, diagrams, and still images to heighten the visual impact of the text, delivering information vividly and persuasively. If you are composing Web pages or apps, you have many more options to make your text truly multimedia—for example, by adding hyperlinks, animation, audio, video, and interactivity to your written text.

Write to think.

The very act of writing—crafting and combining sentences—helps you think creatively and logically. You create new ideas by putting words together to make meaningful sentences and by linking sentences with logical transitions, like however or because, to form a coherent chain of meaning. Many writers equate thinking with writing: “How can I tell what I think,” the novelist E. M. Forster famously wrote, “till I see what I say?” Other writers have echoed the same idea. Columnist Anna Quindlen, for example, put it this way: “As a writer, I would find out most clearly what I thought, and what I only thought I thought, when I saw it written down.” Finally, here’s the way physicist James Van Allen explained the connection between writing and thinking: “The mere process of writing is one of the most powerful tools we have for clarifying our own thinking.”

Write to learn.

As a student, you are probably keenly aware of the many ways writing can help you do well in courses throughout the curriculum. The physical act of writing—from simply making notes as you read, to listing main points, to summarizing—is a potent memory aid. Writing down your rudimentary ideas and posing questions can lead to deeper understanding. Analyzing and synthesizing ideas and information from different sources can extend your learning. Most important, thinking about what you are learning and how—what are called methodologies in many disciplines—can open up new directions for further learning.

Write to succeed.

Writing contributes to success in school and at work. We’ve already suggested some of the ways writing can both help you think analytically and logically and aid your learning and remembering. In school, you need to use writing to demonstrate your learning. You will be asked to write essays explaining and applying concepts and to construct academic arguments using sources and other kinds of evidence. Your skill at doing these things will most likely affect your grades. Writing also helps in practical ways as you apply for internships, admission to professional school, and a job. At work, you may need to write for a variety of rhetorical situations—for example, to evaluate staff you supervise, to collaborate with colleagues proposing a new project, to e-mail suggestions for resolving conflicts or ideas about new initiatives, or to prepare year-end reports justifying expenditures and priorities. Just as your achievement in school is influenced by your ability to write well, so, too, may your professional success depend on your ability to write effectively to different audiences in varied genres and media.

Write to know yourself and connect to other people.

Writing can help you grow as an individual and also help you maintain and build relationships with friends and colleagues. Journal writing has long been used as a means of self-discovery. Many people blog for the same reason. Becoming an author confers authority, giving you confidence to assert your ideas and opinions. Whether you’re tweeting to let friends know what’s happening, posting comments on a Web site, taking part in a class discussion, or participating in political debate and decision making, writing enables you to offer your own point of view and invites others to share theirs in return.