I'm the last person to try to start a sentence with "as a ______," but I am a writer. I'm no pulitzer winner or anything. But I have spent a huge chunk of my life studying the art and craft, including earning a degree in communications.

DISCLAIMER

This is just my two cents. If the research shows this is detrimental to students' writing, then obviously I'm wrong.

First of all, I understand how important attribution and accuracy are. In journalism, if I get the facts wrong in a story, I'm out of a job quicker than almost any other profession. But there's really only one other place that it becomes quite that germane to the communication process: Academia.

We spend our entire education learning how to write essays that are really only meant to become the dissertations of the grad students and phd's that most of us will never endeavor to become. For the rest of us, writing should be as easy as speaking. But we spent our childhood learning bad habits then repeating them back to the teacher. So that now I sit down to read papers that my high school age cousins or siblings write, and I can't even get through it.

The SAT should be testing if you can write. Can you communicate on paper. How well can you pry an idea out of your own mind using nothing but a pen. More importantly, how well can, the reader, read it. How is easy is your message to interpret. None of this has anything to do with facts and quotes.

I know I'm ranting a bit, but I'm incredibly passionate about this. I spent high school and my first two years of college thinking I was gonna be a STEM grad. Computer engineering, specifically. I took a "writing about film" class, found a knack, fell in love, and changed my major the next semester.

You couldn't pass any class in J school with less than a C on a 7-point scale. It was brutal. Moreover when I discovered I had been taught how to write totally wrong my whole life. I've campaigned since to try to get more communicative writing to be taught in high school and even middle school.

TL;DR: No, it's your school teaching you to write wrong. You learn to write academic papers, not narrative stories. The writing in the world of academia is meant to prove things on a level that most of us rarely encounter once we leave school. Communication, on the other hand. That's the necessary skill.