Writing Is for Humans

It, was an error. Not as egregious as this error, though. It was, in fact, neither a duplicate of my errant comma nor my fragment, but one of the more understated errors a student writer can commit, and one that student writers—striking out into new terrain, growing in boldness—indeed often commit: a misused semicolon.

For years, such a solecism would elicit a sigh. Another refresher on punctuation, a dip into what constitutes a clause, etc. etc. If not a sigh, then at least a resigned look, a whip of the pen or a convoluted double-click and comment-add. Such tedious tasks seemed to me the solemn duty of my calling as an English teacher. “You’re doing the Lord’s work,” a full professor once grunted as we met at the copier one afternoon, upon hearing I taught freshman writing. Indeed, and what does the Lord say of the law? Not one iota will pass from it. Scrupulousness.

And yet this particular error (the semicolon) did not produce a sigh. It was instead accompanied by a bizarrely sublime elation. It was precious. I nearly cried. I opened a digital sticky note and wrote: “Endearment of student error in the age of AI?”

I had never loved a misplaced semicolon the way I loved that misplaced semicolon. I could have framed that dainty keystroke. Why? Because it was my student’s. It was his slip-up, his gap in proficiency, his oversight in proofreading, his imperfect yet reaching and expressive attempt at relating two ideas. It was not AI.

I had been sincerely enjoying his essay, that rare breed of competence without the smack of self-importance, when it struck me that perhaps it was too good. Too clean. Too competent. A slew of AI cases in recent weeks robbed me of the simple gift of relishing excellent student work. But then, oh, that sweet semicolon!

Although my cold, Luddite heart cannot find much to celebrate about AI, this is perhaps the one debt of gratitude I owe to it thus far: that it’s clarified what writing is, and that writing is for humans. A decade of teaching introductory writing will calcify anyone. How many times must I explain what a thesis is? A topic sentence? How long, O Lord, must I comment, “revise for active voice”?

And yet not one of these things amounts to true writing, nor all of them strung together. I confess, I have sometimes fallen prey to teaching writing as though correctness was the goal. This philosophy of writing has paved the way for the triumph of AI chatbots, machines that promise easy perfection, prose that is comfortably predictable with a veneer of authority and a buttoned-up readability. Perhaps previous students of mine left my classes thinking, if only I could feed this through a machine to iron out the wrinkles. Then I will really be a writer.

But writing, of course, is not the ironing out. It is, in many ways, the wrinkling.

To write comes from the Old English “to carve” and the German “to sketch”—etymologies that highlight the physicality, the effort, the personal signature of writing. The Latin scribere is “to write down.” To scribe is to translate from thought to symbol, to take idea and make it visible, coded, communicable. When we talk of writing, we still tap this metaphorical language of putting our ideas “down,” as though drawing them from our heads and placing them before us.

What AI does is not writing, of course, because writing is a form of thinking. AI does not think. It iterates. What we see is an illusion of thinking, a phantom of uncountable souls whose thoughts have been Frankensteined into a semblance of the real thing.

In the act of writing, of carving, of sketching, of putting down, time elapses. Our thoughts leap. We hesitate. We make errors. And yet errors can be portals of discovery, of meaning. What are figures of speech if not “errors” in typical constructions? What are insights if not “errors” in preconceived modes of thinking? If we fall into iteration, or trust iteration in its elaborate guises, then we more and more distrust ourselves. We distrust error, limitedness, and therefore discard spontaneity, originality.

It makes sense that AI would flourish in a time like ours when superficial perfection trumps depth of soul, complexity, and flawed beauty. In The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin takes issue with our modern predilection for perfection. In architecture, he argues, it results in buildings that are lifeless, that remove the skilled craftsmen who cannot be relied upon to construct with machinelike exactitude.

We might say things have eroded considerably since Ruskin’s day in the 19th century, whose buildings we now view through misty, rose-tinted glasses, wistfully bemoaning the current state of architecture in which lifelessness has been upgraded to deathfulness. Anyone who has driven through colonies of 90s subdivisions and stucco stripmalls may even find “deathful” too tepid a descriptor.

Listen to Ruskin here: “All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.”

“E for effort” may sound like the mantra we are collectively recovering from, the age of participation trophies et al., but perhaps another E word will do: Exuberance. Quintilian, the Roman pedagogue and rhetorician, writes of hoping for nothing less than “exuberance” in burgeoning students of oratory (boys, in his case). He writes: “Let that age be daring, invent much, and delight in what it invents, though it be often not sufficiently severe and correct… I like what is produced to be extremely copious, profuse even beyond the limits of propriety.” Who among us looks back on our early years of writing education and recalls that daring, inventiveness, delight, and extreme copiousness were the encouraged virtues? I, for one, do not.

Under a “dry master,” Quintilian claims that pupils will become “dwarfish”: “while they think it sufficient to be free from fault, they fall into the fault of being free from all merit.” Students “sink under too great severity in correction; for they despond and grieve and at last hate their work, and, what is most prejudicial, while they fear every thing, they cease to attempt any thing.”

What does this describe if not many contemporary approaches to writing pedagogy? What do our curricula enforce, our standardized tests assess, but cog-like competence: inoffensive, rubric-able, errorless. There is nothing students love more than a good rubric: they know exactly what they need to do to “get the grade,” what cog they need to shape to churn out their desired end. It is not that students naturally write mechanistically, but they gravitate toward it out of fear—fear of fault.

I don’t intend to pummel students or teachers caught in this system. Teachers, in schools that distrust and regulate their intuition and creativity, must become “dry masters.” What else are they to do but point out faults? What are they paid for if not to ensure certain test results? What are they given to measure but letter grades? And, frankly, it’s not always the fault of the institutions, as much as we love to blame the faceless system. We teachers can grow jaded and apathetic toward the amorphous, unpinnable work of teaching: it is endless, exhausting, unlucrative. It is easy to become the dry master when we ourselves feel like nothing more than dust and bones.

Charlotte Mason, the nineteenth-century teacher and philosopher of education, disbelieved in teaching composition at all—if so, very minimally. Instruction on punctuation, she warns, will only bring about “the use of a pepper box for commas.” Drilling students in sentence construction is like drilling them in chewing and swallowing.

Like chewing and swallowing, Mason contends that “telling” is effortless for humans. We are all natural tellers of what we have experienced, read, heard, loved. As students’ writing is “artless,” so will it be “artistic” and “envied for its vigour and grace.” She laments that we disregard the “intellectual power” of our students. When we step in to teach them what they can do naturally, they will come to find, more and more, “that they cannot do it for themselves.”

This encapsulates precisely the attitude of many students in the few fraught years since AI’s public rollout: “I cannot do it myself,” is what they say, directly or indirectly. And where there is no delight in the writing and no room for imperfection, it seems worth the (increasingly) morally ambiguous gamble of leveraging our age’s technology.

I am not one to suffer from existential crises, but there I was, suffering from an existential crisis in the kitchen. It was not the string of student AI abuses that I had managed, it was not the ever-evolving, ever hole-plugging attempts to define AI-writing policies, it was not the parent conversations, it was not the recognition that family and friends were using AI, not the essays by academics in prominent journals shrugging that it all just needs to be embraced, but the crushing feeling that what I had devoted my life to was, ultimately, meaningless. Perhaps this was how the skilled stonemasons felt when architects were no longer interested in their work—the expense of it, the roughness of it.

But as I think of other major shifts in the history of writing, the English Renaissance gives me hope. At the time, it was likely not all as it seems now—bursting with creative energy and innovation. It was likely chaotic, fretful, full of hand wringing and thought pieces. The strife of church and state, the recovery of classical texts, the rise of the vernacular, the printing press! And yet there was Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke writing English versifications of the Psalms (a woman! versifying Psalms! in English!). There was John Donne, with his pepper box of commas, calling the sun, a “sawcy pedantique wretch.” There was Shakespeare, coining words as quick as his quill could ink them. There were no rules. It was the wild west of wordsmithing.

And yet Sidney (Mary as well as her brother, Philip), Donne, and Shakespeare—among other GOATs of the English Renaissance—were tethered by the knowledge of, in Ruskin’s terms, divinely appointed imperfections. They all accepted that the law of human judgment was Mercy—after all, that was the law of divine judgment. The tethering of the divine was what gave them freedom.

Perhaps this is why Mason encouraged students to write verse. Poetry’s unique capacity to court imaginative fancy while enforcing taut constraints means the student writer learns, without much instruction, how to let fly her whimsy and rein it in. Rather like flying a kite.

This is a moment for rebirth, for us to retreat from the battle on the ground and take to the skies. Were the old forms dead already, and this a mere wake-up call that it’s time to take up new ones? What is the form for this age? Who will invent it?

That, of course, will take Effort. We must hold fast to the idea that thinking, for its own sake, is good—and that writing is one way we think. There’s a deeper pleasure in the effort of thinking, in the labor of invention, that we must insist on, a hard-won joy to which the scanty satisfaction of AI dialoguing cannot compare. The rubric needs to include sweat, error, the nerve to try something. The entire class period is devoted to, with lead pencil and lined paper, making a poem. The whole week, if that’s what it takes. To carve, to sketch, to write, to build—these are human endeavors, and the more we outsource them, the more alienated we will become from the world we let the AI phantoms generate for us.

And we may not simply become alienated from the world, but from our very selves. There’s an available analogy here to the advent of search engines and smartphones, which seemed harmless enough—rather a boon. And yet, whose memory has not suffered from overreliance on the internet’s vast and instant store of information? Why hold onto anything ourselves? We marvel as superhuman the ancients’ capacity for memory. In the same way, generative AI may seem like a boon, and while it may not erode our ability to compose entirely, it will undoubtedly thin it out. Perhaps someday those of us living today will be marveled at for our compositional prowess. Perhaps, a couple decades from now, people will begin to radically unplug from AI—much in the way people now radically downgrade to dumb phones—as a way to recover a fuller, more human life. I only hope that, by then, it will still be possible to do so.

AI may very well—with my blessing or no—become commonplace in education, in magazines, in emails, in books, in everything. But if it does, it would be no small wonder to me if people start to reflect on our culture’s written landscape, much as we reflect on our architectural landscape, and feel a yearning for life, for the imperfection that marks human effort.

Image via flickr.