complete! Done!
One might hear this exclamation from elated college students who are relieved or ready to rejoice after completing their latest essay assignment. Instead, I hear these words more and more frequently from fellow professors who believe that the extracurricular paper itself is now complete. Some say this is an outdated task. An outdated form of pedagogy. An abandoned fossil of the age of writing, a new coinage that seemed poised to drive the teaching of writing into extinction.
As the new director of my college’s faculty development office, I am aware of the ongoing conversations about teaching writing, many of which are characterized by frustration, confusion, and pessimism. “I don’t want to read a machine,” lamented one professor. Another person asserted: “I don’t want to police student papers written on artificial intelligence.”
Kevin Roose, technology writer new york timesDuring a recent visit to my campus, he believed that take-home essays were outdated and asked, “Why would you assign a take-home exam, or an essay on Jane Eyrewhat if everyone in the class—except perhaps the strictest rule-followers—would use artificial intelligence to do it? “
Whether this situation is entirely new is debatable. The online resources we have had for decades may have removed the need for students to read independently, but we have not stopped assigning outside reading. If I assigned a novel as rigorous as Charles Dickens Bleak HouseI’ve long known that students have online access to a variety of chapter summaries—CliffsNotes, SparkNotes, LitCharts, etc.—all of which can make the intellectual work of deciphering Dickens’s 19th-century sentences or wading into the abyss of his sometimes obscure prose unnecessary. Perhaps, as recently new york times Article about Harvard students not reading shows that students are not reading That It’s also a kind of homework.
Still, being able to create sentences, paragraphs, essays, and research papers from a single prompt—or now have an “agent AI” devise an entire study in a matter of minutes—seems a little different than Googling a plot summary of the first chapter. Bleak House.
Maybe writing through an LLM is different because it’s not just about summarizing other people’s ideas; It’s asking a machine to transform its own half-hatched idea into a flawless finished product. Somehow the process seems magical, like being able to create a novel or an essay out of just one person. Obsessed– Like a twitch in the nose.
In addition, the problem of extracurricular writing is different from the problem of extracurricular reading because embedded artificial intelligence has become the most basic writing tool-from Microsoft’s Copilot to Grammarly. As tools blur the lines between students and their co-pilots, it will become increasingly difficult for students to discern what is them and what is the machine—much to the chagrin of those students. Do Want to develop autonomous intellectual skills. As high school student Ashanty Rosario complained in an article atlantic On how AI “destroyed my education”, AI tools have become “inevitable” and unavoidably seductive, and shortcuts to learning have become “normalised”.
In a world where AI shortcuts are everywhere, how do we encourage students to take the scenic route? As John Warner reminds us in How We Help Them See More than just words: How to think about writing in the age of artificial intelligence (Basic Books, 2025), Writing is an act of embodied thought, a tool for building human community, connecting one person to another? How do we encourage them to, in the words of Chad Hansen, see their written assignments as “an investment, not just in creating something to turn in on a deadline, but an investment in your humanity”? in a Inside higher education In Hansen’s paper, he described how he told his students, “When you give yourself time to use your talents, you will ultimately change the dimensions of your thinking.”
But there’s a problem. Writing takes time. Teaching writing takes time. The practice of writing requires more time. If time invested in developing human writing skills is still valuable, where can the time be found within the constraints of traditional writing courses? In the past, writing practice took place primarily at home, on student computers and notepads, for hours, days, and weeks. Now that student writing is increasingly being transferred to magical “rescuing” machines, Luce asks, why don’t teachers simply “move to proctored exams, Blue Book papers, and classroom group assignments?”
As a writing professor, my answer is: no time.
Shifting writing practice from primarily an out-of-class endeavor to an in-class exercise does not provide students with the time they need to develop their writing skills or use writing as a means of deep thinking. It also does not allow simultaneous instructions and Enough hands-on experience. At my university, classes usually meet three days a week with 50-minute sessions, or two days a week with 80-minute sessions. Even in “pure” writing courses, such time does not allow students to engage in the sustained practice necessary to develop writing skills. This problem is exacerbated in writing-intensive courses that require significant class time to discuss literary history, philosophy, political theory, religion, art history, or a variety of other topics.
The solution I propose is to invest more in writing instruction, not less: just as we need laboratories for science lecture courses, we should provide needed “writing labs” as adjuncts to writing courses. I don’t mean here a writing lab in the sense of a writing center, where students can choose to seek peer help. What I mean by writing lab is the multi-hour, credit-bearing, required time each week that students practice writing under the supervision of a course instructor or another experienced writing teacher. Such a laboratory would be a time for students to develop independent critical thinking skills, working on assignments from conception to completion, the “cloister”[ed]”As Niall Ferguson said, break away from dependence on artificially intelligent machines. If writing ‘laboratory’ sounds too scientific for the teaching of the human arts, just call it a weekly seminar or internship. (However, even the word ‘laboratory’ has its roots in medieval Latin, from Laborewhich simply means “work or labor.”) Whatever the name, the need is real: You can’t teach writing without students labor.
The problem I want to address is a critical one, and while much has been written about education and artificial intelligence, too few alarm bells are being sounded in the higher education community. Although colleges view writing skills as a primary outcome of a college education, I worry that writing education may soon run into trouble, with out-of-class writing abandoned out of frustration or despair, and in-class time insufficient for the in-depth study of writing required. We call it the quiet abandonment of long-standing writing pedagogies.
If universities still want to consider writing skills as an important learning outcome, they need to think more carefully about what it means to educate student writers in the age of artificial intelligence. To do this, universities must first reaffirm the importance of learning to write and articulate its enduring value as a human endeavor. Second, universities must invest in professional development resources to prepare teachers to teach writing in the age of artificial intelligence. Finally—and this is the crux of my argument—colleges need to restructure traditional models of writing instruction so that students have ample time to practice writing in class with peers and under the supervision of a writing instructor. Only in this case can students rediscover writing as a true labor of love.
