What Do Students Lose When They Stop Writing?

After years of studying how human beings write, the cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg concluded that drafting a basic persuasive essay was as mentally taxing as digging a ditch was physically exhausting. Writing well requires a command of vocabulary, spelling and grammar. It forces writers to comprehend a subject, to sift through their working memory of that topic, to organize and plan. Writing an essay is so difficult that a person in the throes of it can do hardly anything else—as anyone who has shushed a spouse or child while trying to compose a decent sentence can attest. Very few people would volunteer to dig a ditch. Likewise, it is hard—almost impossible, many English teachers will admit—to turn a reluctant writer into an enthusiastic one. Yet the American education system expects nearly all students to learn how to write an essay. It’s little wonder, then, that as soon as a tool arrived promising to lessen the pain people grabbed it.