You know what the irony is - here you are belittling writers of today as you aspire to write a gripping piece -albeit, only an essay - in the hopes of becoming an awesome writer! haha
Listen - with some of your points i do agree. Like yes, many writers today well...suck. And there are many great literary legends of our world's past; but everything you are saying is opinion. For example, Stephanie Meyer's 'Twilight' was mentioned. Now, i have never been a big fan - nor really a fan at all - of 'Twilight' but that has to do with my personal taste. I have friends who adore twilight, and I have gone to see the movies and so on with them. 'Twilight' became a phenomenon worldwide with an acclaiming large fanbase; but I don't see how the story is bad? Why has it become the book to mock? It has become 'cool' now to mock 'Twilight' and really it annoys me. It's not a bad story! And if aliens visit earth and find the book then i think it would teach them a lot about our existance. Firstly, it would show that we believed in vampires, that we had schools and cars and believed in werewolves, and we experienced love etc etc etc. But what makes you so certain that the aliens would even read the book - that they can even read? They would probably throw all our work into the fire to warm themselves up just like humans would have attempted to do.
But that's just my opinion :)

Many a good point, Pants, but, please observe: we DON'T burn books. We'll freeze to death but we'll carry on flaunting our pride AND our shame and let the Aliens decide which is which and why we human species are such a complicated lot. A road sign in the cosmos should read "Welcome to Earth. Pop.: 6 billion. Our motto: "We reserve the right to contradict ourselves""