English majors can become authors

The argument

English majors study many different authors of different ages. Literature courses would have introduced them to literary giants like the Bard’s plays and poems, Dickens’ Victorian tales, Woolf’s radical novels, Hemingway’s sharp prose, and much more. Reading their works could inspire students to become writers like them as well. It doesn’t have to be limited to just writing a book - the job of a writer comes in so many forms nowadays. You could be a storyteller, a blogger, a biographer, even a ghostwriter. Throughout the course of their degree, an English major would learn the importance of writing as self-expression. Authors write stories that to some extent reflected their time, and more importantly themselves.

Premises

Counter-arguments

That an English degree exposes students to great authors and can inspire them to write says nothing about whether authorship, or 'the publishing sector', is a viable career — and viability is exactly what the question asks. A path is viable when it offers a reasonable prospect of stable, paid work, and authorship is famously precarious: the great majority of writers earn very little from their writing, most books sell modestly, and full-time incomes from novels, blogging, biography or ghostwriting are the exception rather than the rule. Inspiration and cultivated skill are necessary conditions for writing well, but they are not sufficient for making a living at it, which depends on market demand, competition and luck. The argument also quietly conflates two different things: 'the publishing sector' is a specific industry with defined roles — editors, literary agents, rights and production staff — while 'becoming an author like Dickens or Woolf' is freelance creative work in a quite separate labour market. Demonstrating that the degree can spark a desire to write, and that writing takes many forms, does not establish that any of those forms reliably pays, so it does not show the option is viable in the sense the position claims.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Each student’s learning experience is different and we cannot assume what they have learned.