Why do we write?

Answer 1

People write to convey messages to the reader. Specifically, author's write for several reasons. Authors write to stimulate reactions, emotions, and mental imagery, etc. For instance, authors write to invoke certain responses from their audience. Sometimes authors write to persuade their audience to react with action by influencing their beliefs, support, and/or call to action through information by influencing their perceptions by getting their audience to write letters; get involved in marches and rallies; make calls or send out emails.

Secondly, authors also write to inform their audience by presenting information through systematic research via memorandums, news coverages, magazine articles; research papers; commercials; media print advertisements, or infomercials.

Lastly, authors captive and entice their audience by entertaining them through their pieces of writing (literature) via poems, songs, comical humor, or thrilling, mystery, or suspense stories that attract and hold an audience's attention. Each purpose utilized by authors is used to cause their audiences to react in different ways that authors would try to draw their purposeful attention to the messages that authors display through their messages to their audiences.

Answer 2

This is a great question! We write for many things: to communicate information to others, of course, such as in the workplace, or when we write emails. Certainly, we also write in school: to complete essays and assignments. But, these are the obvious reasons. I think that, the real question is "why (and how) do we read and write?" When we expand the question like this, we can see that, especially in today's technological age, where news is fed to us quickly, and disseminated across the web, it is necessary to be a critical reader, thinker, and writer. So, as we digest the daily news, a good habit is to ask (or write down on a sheet of paper, that is) what did I just read? What did I just see? Who posted it? Did this text provide enough information for me? Do I feel this is biased in some way, and if so, how? So, this is a long answer to the question, but, basically, we read and write in order to understand our world in a more practical and specific way.