Every time I’ve second-guessed myself about being a “good” writer or explaining to students (whether first-graders, middle schoolers, or undergraduates) how to complete a writing assignment for my feedback, I’ve thought about whether I actually know anything about communicating through the written word. Memories of high school English class follow, with the confusing distinction between citing evidence and explaining it. To a teenager, a quotation from a text is self-evident. If I did the work of dragging it out of the depths of the author’s pages, doesn’t that mean I understand what it means? Doesn’t it speak for itself? Don’t you get it? Marshaling evidence in this manner is enough of a task; asking me to explain what it means to you is silly or condescending or redundant. Eventually, I figured it out well enough to get by in those English classes and go to a large, public university in a Midwestern city. I stayed there long enough to pick up three degrees and learned a lot about myself as a writer in the process. Nothing was more deflating that one of my eventual doctoral advisors telling me my writing was too personal and informal—that it needed to be grounded in existing arguments in the field and to grapple with theoretical framings. I figured out how to do that but I am glad it is not the only way that I can write.
Books such as Warner’s Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and other Necessities, The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing, and now More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, have been clarifying for me as a writer (and by that he would say thinker) and as an educator. Any doubts I might have expressed about my writing development in the trauma-dumping introduction up there have vanished when I’ve read his books. There are plenty of hifalutin reasons to change the structure of schooling in the United States. Warner’s specific focus in this book on what to do when artificial intelligence interferes with writing instruction is not a wholesale, structural recommendation for change, but it does help us reclaim part of our humanity. As he explains in a critique of model of education that prizes task efficiency, “being ruled by the economic style of thinking has caused us to become detached from the experiences we find most nourishing. We are literally out of touch with our own desires around what it means to live a good life” (p. 246). Basically, what is the purpose of all this ostensibly saved time? The promise of AI and ed tech in general is to make students’ and teachers’ time more valuable by doing away with routine tasks so we can all get to the good stuff. This approach doesn’t work because anyone who has worked for a living knows that if you are able to execute your job responsibilities more quickly than expected, your reward is not more free time, but more work. Warner sees that disconnection clearly when he describes the need for a renewed emphasis on those nourishing desires that make life worth living.
Some of those very activities came up in a discussion of “cheating” on the most recent episode of Dr. Mél Hogan’s podcast, The Data Fix. In that episode, her guest, Kane Murdoch, reflects on the difficulties of detecting academic misconduct at the university level and points out how “you can't outsource eating, you can't outsource sleeping, you can't outsource exercise, and you cannot outsource learning. They are embodied activities. And the question then becomes, how do we ensure that someone ate?” The discussion then compares the need to watch someone eat to guarantee they have received the nourishment provided by a meal and how that same level of surveilling scrutiny is not feasible or desirable for guaranteeing that someone has learned. This appears especially difficult considering the possibility of using AI for the learning that is meant to be embedded in the act of writing. I imagine Warner’s response to Murdoch’s comment would be that we have turned the embodied activity of writing into a disembodied, routinized, malnourishing husk of a task. At a point later in the text, Warner uses ChatGPT to evaluate whether it can generate a sample of writing that sounds true to his voice as a book critic. The resulting output is “what [he] would sound like if [he] were being held captive and had to write under duress” (p. 217). So, what he would write if he were under some of the same financial, social, and schedule pressures that Murdoch’s students face. Nothing lifelike, essentially. This external, forced compulsion to write stands in contrast to an idea in another text I read recently, Black womanist theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher’s Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit. In part of her reflections on her experience with her lived environment as a child in Indianapolis, she reveals that “It was through writing, I found, that I could express both my wonder and frustration at the world surrounding me” (p. 78). The writing experiences of many students lean more toward the frustration than the wonder, and all its cathartic power, these days.
In addition to the affirming qualities of Warner’s arguments about the nature of writing as a fundamentally human task, I also appreciate varied insights about other school-related bugbears. He reviews the argument for focusing on handwritten cursive in elementary classrooms and dismisses it with the quip “one of the common laments of the pro-cursive crowd is that students can no longer read the Declaration of Independence in its original documentation, suggesting the power of the document is in the penmanship rather than the ideas” (p. 46). Utterly devastating. I laughed. He identifies this urge to use cursive as being adjacent to the larger forces asking us to return to a supposed ideal past, which is, of course, a fool’s errand.
Speaking of errands, Warner uses the all-too-ordinary grocery list as an example of how writing is embodied with feeling. He shares the memory of “picking up a dropped list from the grocery store floor once, and among the items was Pop-Tarts CHERRY with CHERRY not only in all caps but underlined several times” (p. 85). He goes on to explain how there is essentially a short story’s worth of background to the existence of this discarded piece of paper. As someone who can be particular about his dessert options, I felt a strong resonance with this anecdote. More than that, it makes me think of the grocery lists that Mrs. Tall Rob puts together each week. She uses sheets of paper torn from a daily calendar that I tuck into my wallet as I walk the aisles of Jewel. I have my routine of walking the store in a certain way that is a reflection of not some optimal path (who cares?) but of the order in which she’s organized the list. The point is that she takes the time to write a paper list of ingredients from recipes found in cookbooks that she has prepared many meals from over the years. This little slip of paper lives a short life but it is vital to keeping our family’s lives in motion. Yes, a text message or shared Notes app list could serve the same purpose, but there’s something special about recognizing my wife’s handwriting on the paper in my pocket when I’m at the store that reminds me of what it means to be human because of the connection we share.
Lest you think my focus on food-related writing is evidence of my current levels of hunger, consider Warner’s comparison of writing to baking in the chapter on writing as a practice. He invokes Paul Hollywood from The Great British Bake Off as an example of a skilled artisan making inferences about the quality of a baked good as a result of ingesting it. In the same way, Warner writes, “The practices of chefs and writers are remarkably similar, something I believe to be flattering to both chefs and writers” (p. 92). As with writing, cooking and baking are skills that do not have a “terminal proficiency,” as Warner argues in the book’s conclusion (p. 279). In contrast, there are a finite number of sounds and letters in the English language, and young adolescents soon reach a rate of reading fluency that peaks around 150 words per minute. Education and psychology professor Scott Paris refers to the phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency components of reading as “constrained skills” because they do have a terminal form. (No matter how much you try, you will not manifest a 27th letter of the English alphabet!) So, Paris argues, the vocabulary and comprehension components of reading are “unconstrained skills,” because we can always learn more words or more information. It seems fair to say that Warner would agree that the practice of writing is at its best when it, too, is free from constraints.
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