Writer’s Block

Essays

Whether you’re in high school or university, you’ll undoubtabley be asked to write and essay. In reality, essays are useless. They don’t really teach you anything – they’re just a way for teachers to be as lazy as possible when it comes to grading. You never actually remember anything you write as soon as it’s on the page. An essay doesn’t even assess your knowledge, you could slack the whole unit the memorize three points and ad-lib a half-decent essay. Essays are useless when there are better teaching resources available.

If you’ve ever written an essay, I’ll bet you don’t even remember the point of it. Sure, you probably remember the topic, but do you remember the points you made? Probably not. An essay doesnt leave you with any long term information. Absolutely no new information is learned or introduced through writing five paragraphs on a topic that is usually utterly irrelevant to anything that the student needs to be learning (Why Essays are Really Stupid, Sable-saro 2012). Teachers are the only ones who benefit from essays as it makes their grading easier.

As Paul Graham said in his “Age of Essay” article, essays as just replications of words coming from the teachers mouth (Why Essays are Ultimately Useless, J. Labrum, 2014). People barely pay attention for the entire semester, and don’t have to face consequences thanks to ad-libbing an essay. If we got rid of essays, it would force those students to actually learn, rather than copy out the teacher’s lecture.

Now that there are better resources for teaching, essays are out of date. Tests have changed, even in English class. The working field has changed as well with the introduction of technology and the ability to write an essay is no longer valuable. We need to replace essays with a skill that will actually help us in the future.

Most teachers have the strange idea essays are essential to learning. In reality, essays do little to teach us. You can fake a decent essay with a little dumb luck. On top of that, essay writing is no longer a skill needed in the real world. Really essays are just for lazy teachers that make lazy students. That is why I refuse to write this essay. Oh, wait…