Academic Writing in the Digital Age - Essay Example

Introduction Essay writing has become a vital part of formal education. Before, essays were mainly in higherlearning institutions and were part of the students’ assignments. The essays were used to assess their level of understanding the concept they have been taught in class. High school students nowadays write academic essays as well. Universities are also using academic essay writing as a way of selecting the right students for admission and as a way of assessing performance of their students in the final exams especially in the schools of humanities and social sciences. This essay will look into what essays are, what is its importance especially in colleges, skills gained by academic essay writing, multimedia genre that can equip students with the same skills, how the skills will be of benefit to the students after school and how the digital age will address the needs of the digital students. Academic Essay Writing One cannot understand what an academic essay is before understanding what an essay is. An essay can be described as a piece of writing or wittings from an author’s point of view and it can carry some other authors’ thinking with citations from the authors’. An essay can be inclusive of a number of issues from political manifestos, learned arguments, literary criticism, daily life observations, reflections, to the recollections. There are different forms of essays with academic essays being one. The types are admission essays, film essays and photographic essays. An academic essay is therefore a piece of writing from the writer’s point of view on a particular issue for educational purposes (Ellis & Louise 24). For years, academic writing has been part of college. Students, especially in this digital era, have just been doing it because they had no choice but just to do the essays if they are to graduate. They would do the essays with carelessness or haphazardly just to be done with the painful experience of writing without realizing how important it is to them. Essay writing is not part of the college curriculum to punish or torture students but to equip them with skills that they would use not just in their professions but also in their daily lives (Ellis & Louise 62). Essay writing equips students with a number of skills with the most common one being the ability to write. It is not everyone who can read and write has good writing skills just not everyone who can speak out words is excellent in the language. Essay writing makes one become perfect in this skill of writing because practice makes perfect. One gets to know how arrange their ideas in a systematic and chronological manner (Ellis & Louise 266). Ability to research, use handy information is another skill gained through writing academic essay. When given an assignment to write an essay, more often than not it will include researching for useful information or data. After getting the data from the research, the student will be required to use the information into use in writing the essay. Continuous writing of these essays gradually develops the student’s research skill and the ability to put information to use (Ellis & Louise 260). Few people have the ability to express their point of view whether through speaking or writing clearly. College essay writing comes in handy in helping people with this. This is so because some essays ask the students' point of view about something. As they express their opinions or thoughts about the issue, they develop the skill of expressing one’s thoughts. The skills are developed as expressing through writing first then gradually their ability to express themselves through speaking (Ellis & Louise 32). The other skill that is acquired through writing essay essays is the ability to analyze issues and solve problems. Sometimes essay involve analysis of issues, or giving solutions to problems like say drought, corruption and others. The writing of such essays will require the student to look into such an issue critically and offer way outs. The essays will hence arm a student with these skills. Information technology skills are also partly earned by writing essays. In the contemporary colleges, essays are required to be typed, handed in as soft copies or emails. Research of information mostly includes browsing through the internet or reading e-books. All this equips a student with IT skills (Ellis & Louise 273). Although there are some genres of multimedia that can equip students with the above skills, none can beat the traditional academic essay writing. Video games and cinemas or movies can equip a student with the skills to solve some issues but not writing skills or research skills. Presentation of assignments can be presented in forms of video-recorded presentations but the aspect of expressing oneself through writing will not be there. Different genres of multimedia can be used to break the monotony of writing but multimedia should not completely replace essay writings (Ellis & Louise 15). The big question that nearly all the students ask is how all the essay writing will be helpful to them after they graduate. The answer to this question is that it be very helpful to them. Immediately after college, there is the job of looking for a job. Firstly, students will need to write application letters and curriculum vitae. These two are the most important documents when seeking for employment. Employers check on how one has expressed himself in the two. The interview also needs job candidates to express themselves too. If one lacks that ability, it will be hard to be employed. Secondly, almost all careers involve report writing at some point. Lacking this ability might cost someone a job or might involve straining a lot before finally grasping the context of report writing. Thirdly, analytical skills and problem solving ability is required not only when at work and when at home (Ellis & Louise 186). Computing, digital communication, digital storage and the internet have developed and is growing spontaneously. This development has allowed information to grow and be distributed fast and widely. The digital students' work has hence been made easier since they do not have to go through volumes of books in the library to get the right book for writing essays. They can simply go to e-libraries and find the book they want in the comfort of their rooms. Research through the internet has also become easier. Students do not have to submit their assignments manually anymore and lectures can easily detect plagiary through software (Ellis & Louise 231). Conclusion Academic essay writing has been looked at as a tiresome exercise with no real benefit behind it after college. Traditional essay writing has also been seen as boring and a substitute for it should be invented hence the idea of using multimedia. It is true that essay writing can get boring and tiring at times but completely replacing it with multimedia will not produce the same result essay writing produces. It will be okay if multimedia can be used occasionally to break the monotony of writing though. Work Cited Ellis, Robert A, and LouiseJ Ravelli. Analysing Academic Writing: Contextualized Frameworks. London [u.a.: Continuum, 2005. Print. Read More