This post was written by Kaden Nelson, a Humanities Center student fellow.
It’s difficult to find purpose in writing a paper when its composition sits against the backdrop of what seems to be a progressively purposeless world. Students and scholars in the humanities have been pummeled relentlessly over the last two decades with statistics outlining the death of their own field. Tenure-track jobs in the academic humanities continue to drop off year after year and there seems to be an ever-growing attitude of dismissiveness toward the humanities as a whole. Hosts of articles and authors have tackled this very phenomenon with their own proposed solutions, making it an exceedingly tired conversation in the year of 2025. While the devaluation of the humanities is concerning in and of itself, it is a microcosm of a greater crisis impacting the world at large—we are perpetually exhausted, increasingly disconnected from our humanity, and clawing desperately for purpose during a time when that very act feels futile.
One aspect of my life that has kept me grounded in a purpose has been my campus job at BYU’s Research and Writing Center. It doesn’t come without its challenges, though. As a writing tutor, I often get the dreaded appointment where, with sincere desperation, a student poses a question I am rarely capable of providing a satisfying response to. It’s a proverbial insecurity, one which all writers suffer from and which seems to transcend discipline and disposition altogether: what is the “so what” of my paper? Resisting the urge to pivot to helping with grammar or “flow” (a term which, four semesters deep into this job, I have yet to hear a concrete definition for), I play the classic writing tutoring Uno reverse card instead: what do you think is the “so what” of your paper? A retort which immediately fixes everything, obviously.
Jokes aside, I empathize with and experience this struggle myself. Coming up with a “so what” is oftentimes the most daunting but important task of the writer. It’s true that there are innumerable other tricky parts of the writing process which regularly stump people, from writing introductions to developing a nuanced and specific thesis statement, not to mention sticking the landing of an effective conclusion. But I resonate with—and find bottomless intrigue in—what I would call the so-what struggle. It’s a struggle inseparably tied to the fleshy center of a universal human question, and one which my education in the humanities has given me a variety of tools, including writing, to negotiate with. It’s a question which I believe is a product of the felt purposelessness of our contemporary world: what is the “so what” of life?
Students in the humanities swim and drown in a constant tide of paper-writing. Every semester, I am anywhere between ankles to neck deep in scholarly article analyses, literature reviews, annotated bibliographies, personal narratives, research papers, and treatises of personal dispute. Under no delusion that the world really cares about what I write (it doesn’t), and under no assumption that the general population reads the texts I write about (they don’t), I have still occasionally found myself completing a piece of writing, stepping away from my laptop, taking a deep breath, and feeling a sense of purpose. This matters, I affirm to myself, even if no one besides my professor reads it. For a brief second, I break the surface of the water and breathe.
This relief stems from knowing that it is not the product itself that matters. While it is privileged and tone deaf to assert that grades and outcomes are entirely meaningless, it is also a grave mistake to overemphasize the final draft over the process of forming it. In my experience, the most important part of the writing process is engaging with the so-what struggle—it is excavating out of the parched and stony ground of inquiry a purpose to cling to and cherish. I experienced this recently while writing a paper for a course on the American novel. Having just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a literary tour de force in the gory ruthlessness of the nineteenth-century Western frontier, I was tasked with writing a brief, three- to four-page close reading paper on a section from the novel.
At the same time this paper needed to be written, my life felt as if it were in complete shambles. It was one of those perfect-storm weeks where, with reckless abandon, everything seemed to be failing me. I perhaps could have handled each of the burdens I was dealing with on their own, but they compounded together with magnificent force, and, as one poet says, “life / [was] becoming moment by moment / unbearable.” [1] Worse yet, I still needed to write a paper about McCarthy’s book, a novel which was hilariously far from being a cozy, comforting bedtime story.
When I sat down to outline, I was depleted of motivation and purpose. I stared at the blank white document for what felt like hours but what was likely mere minutes. With fleeting surges of energy, I began to write. Some ideas were just not good, or the way I was expressing them was inarticulate. I typed out sentences which I then immediately highlighted and deleted. I bounced back and forth between the words in the book and the words on my paper like an anxious, balding tennis ball zig-zagging between two vigorous, swat-happy racquets. I moved sections around, adjusted topic sentences to be more precise, and reread my thesis more times than I could count to ensure I wasn’t devolving into tangential non-sequiturs. In my conclusion, I had come up with a fairly thoughtful “so what” to connect my argument to a larger purpose. This was easily the hardest part—it felt impossible to argue that any of this mattered when the issues in my personal life felt so much more real, more pressing, and more material. But I decided it mattered, and it became important to me.
The paper was far from perfect. It was on the shorter side, and, as my professor acknowledged in his feedback, I had in-text citations but no works cited page (an admission which feels far too embarrassing to write here, especially as a senior in college, but I digress). However, for three hours, I did the work of unpacking, organizing, and expressing an argument about something I had read. All of my problems were still waiting for me when I closed my laptop, but after that three-hour writing blip in my day, I felt a sense of purpose. It wasn’t because I had checked the box and submitted the paper just minutes before the deadline; it was because I put cognitive, emotional, and spiritual labor into the writing process. I challenged myself, formulated an idea, and decided it was important enough to materialize in words and give to someone else to be read.
Upon returning to the very real complexities of my life, I was reconnected to my own humanity. I felt like I had more to say, more to write, more to think, more to give. Finding the “so what” in my paper illuminated the “so what” of my life, making it easier to move forward through everything waiting for me on the other side of the assignment. I realized through this experience that writing is not merely escapism. In a world that wants to tell us that our ideas and words do not matter, I posit that writing something—anything—is a powerful form of activism. It is resistance to oppression and unchecked nonchalance. It reminds us not only that our language matters, but that the “so what” behind what we write matters even more. It gives us purpose. So, when the listlessness of daily life and the crushing blows of mortality bound upon me mercilessly, I will let myself write. I will let myself engage with the so-what struggle of that process and, in turn, discover particles of purpose in myself and in my beautiful, tiring life. I will let myself rediscover, over and over again, my role in this all—because this matters.
Reference
[1] Mary Oliver, “Beaver Moon – The Suicide of a Friend”
