English majors can become actors or actresses

The argument

The entertainment sector is often treated as an unlikely destination for an English graduate, and this argument holds that the assumption is backwards: the industry is fundamentally built on creative writing. That is obvious enough in screenwriting and in storyboards, where the work is writing in the ordinary sense, but proponents argue it is no less true of acting. Actors and actresses from all across the world have made English their priority in school for good reason, and stars including Emma Watson, James Franco and Hugh Grant are among them. The reason lies in what the job actually involves. An actor receives a script and must turn it into a person, which is a problem of interpretation before it is a problem of performance. They read for what is implied rather than stated, for what a line reveals about the person saying it, and for how the parts of a text bear on one another — which is to say they work as critical readers, applying to a screenplay the attention an English student applies to a novel. The comparison extends to what they produce from that reading. Much as an analytical essay on a work of classic literature constructs an account of the text and argues for it, actors form their own characters and their backgrounds, building a history for a person the script may only sketch. What results is a unique narrative that the actor judges to fit the circumstances of the source material — whether that source is a novel, an original screenwriting idea, or any other creative medium. Because acting is this kind of interpretive work, the argument concludes, the entertainment sector is a viable career option for an English major.

Premises

Counter-arguments

There is an incredibly loose connection between majoring in English and actors and actresses. Yes, some very famous stars on film came from an English background, but a majority of actors did not. Simply because some of the most famous names received English degrees does not necessarily equate to an inherent bond between the entertainment industry and English. An actor's skills are vastly different from those of a critical reader or analytical essay writer, and to claim they are at all linked with one another is stretching the argument itself thin over a multitude of seemingly unrelated fields of study. The argument is purely based off of circumstance, not much else.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] The connection between writing and filmmaking does not equate to a connection between majoring in English and acting. Many actors and actresses are very famous who did not major in English, so the proposed correlation between the two is thin at best. Acting and writing analytical essays or close reading are different disciplines. [Rejecting P3] English majors should not necessarily be actors or actresses.

Further reading

https://english.gmu.edu/careers/famous-english-majors