<p>I remember working on a project with a group of developers and they always wanted static
 html text to be inside of an out tag (<code>&lt;c:out value="words" /&gt;</code>). I don't remember why
 this was the case.</p>

<p>Is this really a best practice when building jsp pages?  What are the 
advantages/disadvantages of such an approach?</p>

If you're just printing out plain text it's better to do it in HTML.  The advantage of the
```
c:out
```
tag is that you can evaluate expressions inside the tag.
```
```
<c:out value="Hello ${user.firstName} ${user.lastName}"/>
```
```