Why do I have to write this paper?

Why do teachers make such a big deal about writing research papers?  Why do they assign so many points to them and spend so much time on them if they’re just another assignment for school?  The answer lies deep within the core of the academic world.  

At colleges and universities, professors talk about facing the pressure to “publish or perish.”  They often are required to write and publish a certain number of articles in academic journals to show that they remain on the cutting edge of their field.  Those professors (in the humanities especially) emphasize paper writing as one of the main methods of evaluating student knowledge of a given topic.  The roots for this emphasis extend all the way back to Ancient Greece and Rome (and beyond) when humans began recording their societies’ knowledge and preserving it for the future.  As technologies such as paper and printing presses evolved, the emphasis on writing down knowledge grew even stronger.  As colleges and universities developed around the world, recording new discoveries and publishing them for public evaluation became the gold standard for proving an idea’s merit.  Even today in the time of the Internet, published text is still the primary source of information on the web—even Google admits that this is the case.  And so, the scholarly paper remains, especially in the academic world, as the primary way a student demonstrates his or her grasp of a subject.

When students write the secondary-source paper the way it is supposed to be written--the AP English Way--they read a work of significant literary merit, they engage with the author’s ideas, they research further information on the author’s ideas, and then they write a thorough and detailed analysis of the work’s core concepts.  These papers often focus on one (key) aspect of the author’s thinking and then synthesize other thinkers’ and writers’ ideas about similar content into a uniquely crafted work of their own.  Done right, these papers represent an “epiphanizing” event for the author where they create new ideas of their own out of the combined knowledge of others.   This accretion and production of knowledge is at the root of education and of the discovery of “new” ideas.  

While at one point in the ancient world it may have been different, in the modern world, new discoveries are almost always the result of someone combining existing knowledge from multiple sources in new and original ways.  And then, of course, publishing that knowledge so that other researchers, such as yourself, can do what they did.  As Sir Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”  You write papers so that this process may continue, and, who knows, you may be one of those giants upon whose shoulders the next Newton will stand.  Or perhaps—if your paper is written the AP English Way--that next Newton may be you.