English majors can become authors

The argument

Supporters of this position argue that an English degree amounts to a long apprenticeship in writing, and that the publishing sector is therefore a natural destination for its graduates, because English majors can become authors themselves. English majors study many different authors of different ages: a literature course will have introduced them to literary giants, to the Bard's plays and poems, to Dickens' Victorian tales, to Woolf's radical novels and to Hemingway's sharp prose. Studying work of that range does two things at once, on this view. It shows what can be done with the language, what a sentence or a scene is capable of carrying, and it makes the ambition of doing it oneself concrete rather than abstract. Reading such works closely enough to analyse them could inspire a student to become a writer like them. Proponents add that the destination is broader than it first appears. The job of a writer comes in so many forms nowadays that nothing here need be limited to just writing a book: a graduate could be a storyteller, a blogger, a biographer, even a ghostwriter. The breadth matters to the argument, because it means the central skill an English degree builds has more than one market to sell into rather than one narrow and crowded one. Underpinning both points is what supporters take the degree to teach about writing itself. Throughout the course of their degree, English majors learn the importance of writing as self-expression, that authors write stories which to some extent reflected their time and, more importantly, themselves. On this account that is the transferable lesson: a graduate who has learned how a writer's own material becomes their subject has learned what each of these roles actually requires. For proponents, this is what makes the publishing sector a viable career option for an English major.

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.