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Hi, I'm Erik Trump, I teach in the Political Science department at SVSU.
As a student, your writing begins and ends in the classroom while you're an undergraduate.
Every semester you get three writing assignments, and you complete all three of them and earn
a grade for the class. But the skills that you're learning as you are doing that writing,
those are skills that you carry from class to class and beyond the university.
I think one of the most gratifying things for me is to hear from former students who
come back to describe the ways in which they've used writing in the real world. This is particularly
true for students who go on to graduate studies and go on to law school. And they come back
and the stories always have pretty much the same trajectory. The story always begins,
"I thought I was a really great writer, I thought I knew it all because I had gotten
good grades as an undergraduate, and then I got to law school and suddenly the expectations
were ramped up." The second part of this story is also always
the same, "but because I had worked on my writing as an undergraduate, because I had
this foundation, I was able to ramp up my own skills at that next level." And it continues
beyond the law school experience. So again, a former student once said that their first
clerkship with a federal judge reminded them that they still had something to learn when
he sent them home with a grammar book and suggested read this, and study this, an hour
every night, and I'm going to look at your work every day and critique it.
And in that process of honing those skills, one then becomes the master teacher who later
will mentor other young writers, because in a field like law for example, clear communication
is so crucial to ensuring that the correct nuance of a decision is expressed, ensuring
that the law itself is written precisely and accurately, so that it is not misunderstood
or misapplied at some point. And that's one of the real world uses to which
students can put their writing to use after graduation. But again, it always takes continued
effort and continued development, and practice.