To be completely honest, I’ve never been a huge fan of English class. I’m simply not creative when it comes to writing and just when I think I got a good idea, I never can seem to write it out on paper as well as I had thought it in my head. This said though, if you ask anyone that knows me, the first thing they’ll probably tell you about me is that I talk a lot. So you see, my reasoning has always been that if I can talk in English just fine, what need is there to hurt my brain struggling to write long essays and interpret odd poetry? What is the purpose of struggling to take this class for so many years? I simply didn’t understand why we all needed to take grade 12 English for university. Sure, if I was going into acting or writing, or even teaching, I get it, but I wanted to go into medicine. I personally found it irrelevant to my life.
But… like with many other things, I am wrong once again. Recently I’ve thought it over and realized that I’ve been greatly mistaken.
So… As much as I don’t want to admit it, English is definitely not useless. I now understand that taking this class for four years helps you speak respectfully, write simpler and be able to think more critically. I may even say that it’s essential.
After thinking about this for a bit, I realized that when you are forced to analyze literature in English class, what is actually happening is that you are being challenged to understand the world around you. When you painfully write on and on about the characters’ motivations and the causes and effects of actions in the story, you start to develop a new understanding of others. It helps you develop empathy and it familiarizes you with other cultures (Thompson). It shows you that different people have different ways of thinking and you gain this new perspective that allows you to better understand what is happening in your family, with your friends or even at school. By analyzing every detail in a text, English teaches you to look beneath the surface of things, all while reading between the lines.
This said, although reading and analyzing text benefits you in many ways, when it comes to writing, I have reason to believe that that can actually benefit you even more. If you know how to express yourself in a concise manner, it’ll make communication easier in any job you have. When you are spending hours on end staring at your google doc with just one paragraph on it, knowing you have 20 more to go, you aren’t wasting time.
Simply sitting there trying to figure out what you’re going to write next, forces you to develop critical thinking skills. It makes you get in the habit of thinking very deeply about every word you choose. This helps in the long run since it is crucial that you always think before you speak and that when you do so, you chose the right vocabulary that won’t offend anyone.
I want to earn the respect of my peers when I get a job one day. I want to be a physician that is respectful to my patients, and thoughtful about their families. I want to be able to comfort someone when their loved one is going through a difficult time. I was reading a post on a blog and this doctor talked about how being an English major has helped her learn “to become a critical thinker — to look beyond what’s obvious, and consider all that matters” (Davis). Davis also wrote that great stories “give readers insights into human frailty” and “show the readers, in their turn, how to be more humane.” Reading this further proved to me why English is important.
And honestly, any job you choose, will require this skill. You need to be able to communicate well with people in any career. To be a good employee any company expects you to be able to complete paperwork correctly, even if that may not usually be part of your job description. You always must be professional and be able to remain accountable to the people you work for or with (Lake).
I was also just reading an article that supports this idea that English teaches you communication. It mentioned how there are three aspects to communication…
– A person thinks of a thought worth sharing
– Mark Frankel
– The thought is expressed in writing (or speech)
– A person reads (or listens) to what was written to discover the original thought
If you stop for a minute and just think about it, you will realize, just like I did, that without English class, you wouldn’t be able to do any of those points on that list. Without English, proper and effective communication simply cannot exist. And for every single university program, you MUST have good communication. You need to know how to communicate respectfully with your professors, communicate with friends about assignments, communicate clear thoughts through projects…
So… long story short, I really believe that taking English in high school should be mandatory all the way to grade 12 because it teaches you to admire and respect other people’s culture and way of thinking and also how to talk in a respectable way with others around you. If it weren’t mandatory, I believe that students wouldn’t be as prepared for life, no matter what they want to go into, since they wouldn’t be as familiar with being professional and proper.
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