Part of (perhaps most of) the reason I do what I do as a professor -- part of the reason I am a professor -- is because of a commitment to the goals of personal freedom and authenticity. I want my students to know more about the world and to know more about themselves so that they will have increased ownership of their own identities, lives, and choices. Since most of the students I teach will go on to be teachers, there is a trickle down effect. Hopefully, my students will help their students take increased ownership in their lives in some unknowable future.

In order to do that, students must posess two skills. First, the ability to reflect on and interpret experience (their own and the knowledge of other's experience granted through texts). Second, they need to be able to process and express that reflection in a way that is meaningful to others. They need to be able to reconstruct their own experiences and represent them in ways others can understand.

Writing is a key part of that second skill. There are other ways of reconstructing and representing experience -- more "artistic" ways like painting or sculpture or whatnot. Writing, to me at least, is a (if not the) primary way of doing that. It is certainly the way most privliged in higher education. It is also the way in which I best reconstruct and represent my own experiences, so I am biased. Writing, ideally, forces a student to think about, clarify, and present their own ideas, beliefs, experiences, etc for public consumption. That's why it is so important to do it well.