Writing Isn’t As Important As We Think – NY Times 9-29-2026
Re:
“I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think.,” By Joe Cruz, op-ed, The New York Times, Sept. 29, 2026
Word document posted above
This an example of a piece written by a writer who is eager to show he has something new to offer. On a subject — writing, rhetoric — about which the best has already been said.
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I sent the article to my friend (going back to our high school days in New England) Tom Linehan.
With the following comments:
I am not impressed.
And just having read this op-ed, I find I disagree — completely, or almost so (at the least).
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He commented as follows.
Roger, Could not agree more with your view. This strikes me as investing an old complaint most students have had at one point or another with some recent experiences and factoids to seem a fresh insight.
Think it is the reverse: writing is important because it requires organizing your argument, supplying supporting data, and showing how you arrive at a specific conclusion or interpretation. You amend the language to make your meaning clearer, to eliminate unnecessary detail, and to make your arguments as sharp and specific as possible to assert your conclusion.
Very few students could perform these functions as well using only thinking [italics added], and a tiny minority could debate the topic to carry an important point, as opposed to speaking articulately to counter the objections raised by others. Sprightly counterpoint so useful in debate is not what good writing is intended to inculcate.
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“Very few students could perform these functions as well using only thinking,” he writes.
This gets at the core of my own experience as a high school, college student and professional writer.
Writing involves mental processes that were also involved in courses I took in French, Latin, and mathematics. Applicable to writing (composition).
The ability to organize information and develop and articulate a coherent and cogent train of thought. An argument (used in the broad sense).
It also involves, requires, the gift of language.
Expression.
Such as waters like Melville and Hawthorne. had. Theodore Dreiser. Henry Miller.
These writers were not necessarily outstanding thinkers, or intellectuals per se.
They had the sort of gift that great conversationalists have.
They WROTE.
The way a composer or songwriter composes.
The labor of words, as the literary scholar Christopher P. Wilson put it, is very much a mental activity. And, a form of mental labor.
It can’t be mastered through theorems, axioms, mental games, or classroom discussions.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
October 2026
