Is there any point still teaching academic writing in the AI age?

A robot at a typewriter University students, virtually everyone agrees, ought to learn to write well. Writing is an essential skill for academic and professional life, and so, across disciplines, we teach students to compose essays, reports, research papers and literature reviews. We want them to develop a command of language, an understanding of structure and form, and maybe even an original voice. However, in the age of AI, what it means “to write” is changing. Those of us above a certain age might still picture a person sitting at a desk, or in a coffee shop, surrounded by books as they tap out a first essay draft on a keyboard. But in the not-too-distant future, a student given a writing assignment will be more likely to start by dictating her scattered thoughts and half-baked ideas into a phone app that transcribes them into text. Next, she might feed those dictated notes into a writing assistant such as ChatGPT, asking it to convert her observations and insights into a coherent essay or forum post. Now she has a rough draft. Perhaps she will then sit down with her laptop to thoroughly edit it – or perhaps she’ll just make a few quick changes on her phone before submitting. For those of us who teach writing – those of us who spend our days preaching the importance of outlines and proofreading – it’s important to think about how the processes of writing are changing, because our teaching will have to change accordingly. To my mind, there’s not much point being romantic about the bygone days of robot-free writing: the terrors and possibilities evoked by staring at a blank page, not knowing where to begin. Cursive used to be an essential skill for writing quickly by hand, but who even carries a pen now? Eventually, primary schools will stop teaching it. Perhaps, as students get used to dictating their thoughts to a computer, typing, too, will cease to be a relevant skill. However, while change might be inevitable, we should not greet it with indifference. Technological change is normal; it is […]

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