The Erosion of Skills Because of Technology

Great Dane Photo © dmussman | Deposit Photos (I saw a Great Dane the other day. MMagnificentaginicent–and huge dog)

All the time, I run into people who seem to have either forgotten how to do something—or never learned how—and expect the technology to do it for them. We’re seeing that show up with Chat GPT. College students think nothing of using it to create a paper instead of learning the writing and research skills. Writers are using it to create entire books so they can flood the market, never mind if the books are any good.

Technology has been eroding skills for some time. We used to know when to go to sleep, but then the technology of lightbulbs allowed us to stay up later. Now we need sleep apps to tell us when to go to sleep, and gurus to explain how to get better sleep.

I’ve been thinking about this as I work through my Depth Curriculum (which needs a better name, since it’s not exactly about Depth). Depth is Dean Wesley Smith’s term for adding setting and the five senses from the character’s opinion. Yet, the earliest reference to this particular skill that I’ve found is in The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton, dated 1925 (the original version is available on Google Books for free).

She mentions it in passing, almost as an “of course, you would do this” (it’s a single sentence). Obviously, they didn’t have much in the way of technology. You couldn’t Google what a faraway tropical island like Hawaii looked like, but you could transport the reader with what the character sees: Palm trees with friendly fronds whispering in a gentle cool breeze; the fragrant plumerias with delicate, soft petals; the taste of a sweet, juicy pineapple.

The pulp writers did the same thing. I remember reading Raymond Chandler’s description of the Santa Ana winds of Los Angeles. Having grown up there, it reminded me of home. But someone living in Indiana and reading the same story, they would have a different experience from the tall corn stalks muttering in the breeze they saw every day.

And it’s not taught in many of the craft books available for writers today; in many cases, it’s actively discouraged. There’s a book, published by a New York house, that I’ve found in Barnes and Noble where the writer proclaims that it’s not necessary to do setting or five senses. You’d think that a New York publisher would be invested in getting this kind of thing right so they could sell more books, but noooo…

What changed?

I think it was the introduction of movies and television. I grew up in Los Angeles, and older Hollywood is a fascinating historical topic for me (anything beyond the 1980s, no). Suddenly we could “see” Bali in The Road to Bali, or travel to another planet in Journey to the Seventh Planet or watch Godzilla destroy Tokyo. 

But movies have a big limitation: They can only give us the sense of sight and sound. Even the sweltering heat of a day in Los Angeles could only be conveyed by seeing the character mop sweat or listening to him complain about it. Hollywood tried introducing Smell-O-Vision, but it didn’t get much traction.

I grew up watching movies on TV and came to see the world as if it were a movie. On the writing message boards years back, writers would talk about seeing their novels as movies. I think this view lent itself to losing depth. Some writers focused on only the sight sense, and others stated they didn’t describe anything because they wanted the reader to picture it themselves.

The problem with this thinking is that it undercuts the ability to do characterization, significantly. Characterization is a whole story skill—you need every story part to bring it to life.

Over time, Hollywood’s changed from those early days. Now they use lots of closeups of the actors, rather than long shots that show the setting. It’s a lot easier to cut here and there if the movie runs too long. At one point, I pictured my scenes as a series of close-ups, rather than characters in a place where a skim of clouds marks the sky and the sun is comfortably warm (today’s weather). And, blissfully, no construction banging, drilling, squeaking, and grinding.

Then there are the basic tools of writing, grammar, and spelling. A business writing class I attended years back said that spell checker is actually making us spell more poorly. The grammar checkers may be doing the same thing.

I use ProWritingAid, Grammarly, and PerfectIt to help me find typos. ProWritingAid also helped me identify that I was using a lot of passive voice; I always exited the program and worked on correcting those myself without the tool’s aid. Just the mere identification and working through fixes helped me subconsciously write my sentence structures differently, so I don’t get as many flags. But ProWritingAid seems to have a zero-tolerance policy for it, insisting I change all instances. There are also lots of false audits, things that don’t need to be changed.

However, the programs continue to change as I use them. Now I’m seeing many, many “recommendations.” It tells me I should remove this word (zero tolerance for certain words), or change this word to another one; it doesn’t like the comma where I put it; I’ve had character names that it tells me are wrong and wants to correct to someone’s real name.

But what is this doing to our general writing abilities, not to mention the creative part of that? It’s easy for me to imagine that a writer might look at what the machine is recommending and assume it’s right. And in effect, add another cook to the pot that creates muddled writing. Computer programs don’t understand when you want an intentional pause to a sentence, or that a character might say, “It was freaking huge.” When I use words like that, the tool informs me I should use a better word like “enormous.” While it suggests this is better, it would take out my characterization with the substitution.

New writers always start out asking permission. They see a writer do something cool in a book, they ask other writers for permission. Can I do that? (and may actually be told they can’t.) An AI grammar tool provides another way for them to ask permission instead of letting the creativity fly and see what happens.

Sometimes you want to use a bigger word because that’s part of your author voice. What’s wrong with that?