Learn and Earn: Why Students Should Learn to Write

Have you ever wondered why you have to take writing classes to get your college degree? Have you heard others bemoaning having to take composition, essay-writing, or basic grammar courses? Have your children or students ever asked you, "Why do I have to learn this stuff?" 

Grammarly, a company devoted to the development of writing skills through online automated grammar checking, recently conducted research to help answer those questions.

  
Specifically, they set out to determine if there were any correlations between writing skills and career success.

The good news? Better writing, they found, correlated with success!

Method

The company started their research by looking carefully at the profiles of freelancers listed on the Elance online staffing platform who had gotten high ratings, 4-star or 5-star ratings, from employers. What were the Grammarly folks looking for as they reviewed those high-rated employees? Grammatical and mechanical errors, of course!  It's what they do best!

Results

Grammarly found that freelancers in all eight Elance categories who had the highest ratings also had fewer grammatical and mechanical mistakes than other freelance employees who had earned lower ratings.

 
In other words, better writing equaled more satisfied employers.

Furthermore, to reiterate findings provided by Grammarly, the better writers earned more!

• Freelancers in Engineering & Manufacturing with 10 or fewer errors in their profiles on average made $520.64 per job; while those with 30 or more errors made on average $237.42 per job. 
• Freelancers in Sales & Marketing with 10 or fewer errors made about $498.26 per job; while those with 30 or more errors made on average $182.07 per job.

The better writers in both categories earned more than double their counterparts!

Discussion

Although cause and effect cannot be determined based on this survey of freelance professionals and their employment ratings, the results show a definite correlation between writing skills and high-rated employees.  For example, those who were already skilled writers working in disciplines devoted to writing, "Freelance Writers & Translators,  made the fewest amount of mistakes, averaging 10.1 errors per every 100 words."  On the other hand, "Freelancers in the IT & Programming fields fared the poorest, with 19.3 errors per every 100 words." 

Read more about Grammarly's findings in the attached infographic, and keep practicing your writing! As this study shows, learning to write well is well worth the effort.

Are you ready to learn to write better for the opportunity to earn more? 

Try my complete online writing course on Udemy, Writing for English Composition: College Essays!