Most other courses contribute in some way to one or more of these outcomes. Enhancement of critical thinking skills, for instance, is a normal outcome of any post-secondary academic course. Most disciplines also expect students to read and write extensively. But that is the difference. English is the only discipline, along with closely related fields like Creative Writing, that provides direct instruction in reading and writing for their own sake as its primary educational purpose.
Students encounter imaginative, argumentative, and informative literature.
They learn to identify organizational strategies such as comparison and contrast, coordination and subordination, cause and effect, description and narration. They come to realize the significance of imagistic and thematic patterns, and to see the linkages between ideas, attitudes, emotions, events, and characters. Writing Reading skills also contribute directly to, and indeed are inseparable from, writing skills. Improvement in the level of writing ability is an equally significant and fundamental educational outcome of first-year English. Writing competencies include grammatical, constructional, organizational, and rhetorical skills, skills that are directly associated with the general growth of linguistic sensitivity.