Professors assign papers because they want you to think rigorously and deeply about important questions in their fields. To your instructors, writing is for working out complex ideas, not just explaining them.
Your professor is not interested in you explaining someone else's definition of a subject. They are interested in what your personal definition and understanding of that topic is.
Professors are scholars and artists: Most of your professors have had little to no formal training in pedagogy (the science of teaching). They’re extensively trained in their scholarly or creative fields, well versed in relevant theories, methods, and significant findings.
In collage teaching is the technical term for what professors do, but in reality they more give out the information they have accumulated to people who also wish to go into the fields they have spent, sometimes, decades studying. It is not so much teaching as it is the sharing.
Obviously you can write. And in the age of Facebook and smartphones, you might be writing all the time, perhaps more often than speaking
We communicate more through text than with our voice. We send emojis to show our faces. We have digitized ourselves completely, so what is the point in meeting with someone? To talk and form a connection, to create individuality with one another, you remember one person's face as opposed to another, but when everyone is just black text, or a single image in the corner of your screen, who is anyone anymore?
The idea is that if you just make yourself write, you can’t help but produce some kind of useful nugget.
The common saying "if a million monkeys are typing randomly on a keyboard eventually one will write Shakespeare" comes to mind. I often hate free writing, but what the author says here is something I need to keep in mind. I do not need to analyze the words I am putting down in this time. If I end up writing something that sparks an idea then that will happen without me thinking about it, it will be more of an emotional reaction, which will then trigger the intellectual side of my brain that was blocked off.
you’re conveying, in written communication, some intellectual work you have done
Your writing is a cumulation of hours of reading your topic, translating the language to something you can understand, then taking your words and configuring them to fit that same language.
You don’t write to teachers, you write for them
Do not write like you are explaining your topic to someone who does not understand. Write like you are proving you understand it to someone who understands it better than you.