WHY STUDY WRITING?

It's a busy world. Is it worth it then, to take a valuable day from your life to study writing? After all, you learned to write in school … and you do it every day.

The problem is that you learned in school to write a certain length (400 words, five pages, etc.) and you learned to use big words and long sentences to impress some professor whose fleeting touch with the real world might have been a couple summer jobs.

You learned long ago that the real world wasn't like that. In a fast-paced workplace, precision and brevity are valued. Yet all too often, you see e-mails, and sit through presentations, that are too long, don't get to the point, and require additional responses.

Not only do they take more of your time, they take more time than necessary for the original author.

As the National Commission on Writing put it: "Writing today is not a frill for the few, but an essential skill for the many."

And as one progresses in an organization, more time needs to spent writing - and more is expected of that writing.

Training is about changing performance and the experts say that one necessary ingredient to changing performance is the opportunity to practice what's been learned.

Unlike many other subjects (and classes you've sat through), writing provides students an immediate -- and daily -- opportunity to practice what they've learned.

Here's what members of the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. corporations, had to say on the subject:

• "Writing skills are fundamental in business. It's increasingly important to be able to convey content in a tight, logical, direct manner, particularly in a fast-paced technological environment."
• "People's writing skills are not where they need to be. Apart from grammar, many employees don't understand the need for an appropriate level of detail, reasoning, structure, and the like."
• "My view is that good writing is a sign of good thinking. Writing that is persuasive, logical, and orderly is impressive. Writing that's not careful can be a signal of unclear thinking."
• "Recent graduates may be trained in academic writing, but we find that kind of writing too verbose and wandering."