The other humanities courses give you a glimpse of what you don't know. It's a bit of a Dunning-Krugger scenario. You can't know what you've never heard of, an

The other humanities courses give you a glimpse of what you don't know. It's a bit of a Dunning-Krugger scenario. You can't know what you've never heard of, and can't begin to self-teach yourself a thing if you don't even know it exists. Or, perhaps another way of saying it is: I think it's safe to say that no one in the 21st century has heard of "The Seven Types of Ambiguity" outside of an academic setting. Without a frame of reference to start from, I don't know how anyone would progress past a sort of floundering beginner stage of writing ability. It should not be left out that these humanities courses at the latter end of the undergrad level and into grad school are not 200 people sitting in front of a lecturer in an auditorium, either. They're more like a moderated philosophical discussion with the professor guiding the discourse among a dozen to 20 people. If you get nothing else from them, you get "how to analyze a thing, present your opinion of it, and defend that opinion to others." If you aim to convince others that your words have some sort of meaning of worth to them, that's a pretty obvious basic qualification.