In Defense of Writing

I entered the education business in the year 2000, shortly before the passing of the No Child Left Behind Act, and from that moment to this one, the act and the art of writing have been cheapened, under-supported, under-appreciated, and dismissed in far too many states and schools. As a writer, I object. As a thinker and a citizen, I’m concerned.

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It’s often said that if you want something emphasized in school, you test it—and that if you don’t test it, it will end up being de-emphasized whether you want it to be or not. Standardized tests in social studies and science were not included in NCLB, which led many states and schools to narrow the curriculum and pay less attention to those subjects, purely out of a survival instinct and a fear of getting punished for poor reading and math scores. Writing suffered the same fate; where it wasn’t included in assessments, it wasn’t taught or demanded as comprehensively as it should have been. And where it was taught, it was approached too often as a “teach to the test” task: however writing was tested, that’s exactly how—and how much—it was taught.

And how was it tested? As a timed task, always. As a response to comprehension of text, sometimes. As a way of making an argument about a hot topic, fairly often. It was scored according to a rubric, by people who did not know the student, and it yielded a number which told schools and teachers and students…very little. In all my days in the test-prep biz, I never heard of writing scores being determinative; they were part of the picture, but they were never important enough to make or break the overall score. And where the scoring rubrics were made public, writing became a very trainable task. It was not a thing that mattered; it was simply a thing that had to be done.

Why does writing matter? Because it forces us to visualize what we’re thinking. When we speak, the words drift out into the air and are gone. We can’t call them back. We can’t re-shape them. And it’s very difficult to build upon them in the moment, to create a structured argument or idea. Not impossible, obviously (our ancient ancestors managed it)—but difficult.

When the words are in front of us, on paper or on a screen, we can look at them and say, “That’s exactly what I meant,” or we can look at them and say, “That is not it at all.” Writing helps us think about what we’re thinking. Writing allows our words to be clay, and gives us time (if we are given time) to shape and re-shape that clay until the resulting object pleases us. This blog post may be good or it may be bad, but I can assure you, the published version will look nothing like the first draft. I’ve already written and cut whole paragraphs, and I haven’t even gotten through a draft yet.

Is that just because it’s difficult to find the right words to express our thoughts? Sure, partly, sometimes. But it’s also because it’s difficult to know just what our thoughts are when they’re swirling around our head, unformed and unexpressed. When you write the words down and say, “No,” it may not be because the words aren’t right; it may be because what you thought you were thinking wasn’t really what you were thinking, or what you wanted to say wasn’t quite this. It’s hard to know until you see it.

“What are you trying to say here?” requires a lot more focused coaching and regular feedback from a teacher than “what is a noun?” And it requires time—writing time and reading time. Unfortunately, in far too many places, teachers have less and less time to devote to writing, the older the students get. As writing becomes longer and more complex, the time it takes to read it thoughtfully and give useful feedback can become overwhelming, and the expertise required to give meaningful feedback increases. If the real value in writing is formative (I’m working my way towards what I’m thinking), rather than summative (here—it’s done—what did I get?), students should have someone sitting with them from the initial outline through all of their drafts, guiding and helping them. And yet, I’ve known too many students who get no feedback at all, just a letter or a number grade, or who get some desultory red marks on their paper at the end of the term, when there’s no time to do anything about it. And I’ve known too many teachers who become overwhelmed by the task of responding to student writing in any way that’s helpful. Good teachers—trained and experienced teachers who might actually have something useful to say about a student’s writing—the kind of teachers we seem to be losing from the workforce every month.

I think this is where the brave, new world of generative AI could be helpful, as I wrote last year. If what students need is a personal writing coach, a little Jiminy Cricket perched on their shoulders whenever they’re working, guiding and advising them, then this new technology may be the best way to give them the support they need, at scale.

What we do not need is a faster way to render a rubric score—which is what we’ve had from technology so far. We’ve had auto-grading software, though most of it required a pretty heavy hand of human training at the individual question level before it could be used. Now, though, with tools like ChatGPT, we have the ability to engage students in actual discourse around their writing—to give them immediate feedback on whatever they are writing, focused not only on grammar and structure, or even on whether a response is factually correct or not, but also on matters of craft and voice.

Does this remove the teacher from the equation? No! Or, at least, I hope not. But it can provide a kind of electronic teaching assistant to extend a teacher’s reach, doing the slow and patient work of helping hundreds of students simultaneously: asking questions; providing feedback; pushing students to try again, to rephrase, to refine and iterate. It can help change the conversation from writing-as-compliance-task to writing-as-learning-and-reflection.

But does this really matter? Reflecting on what we’re thinking, and how and why we’re thinking it—being extra careful about the words and arguments we use to communicate our thoughts—isn’t that a bit of an elitist luxury? What difference does it really make?

I think it makes all the difference in the world. I think we are rushed and sloppy with our thinking and our sharing. We tweet, we text, we post…we blurt out our thoughts as fast as we can type them, and we create confusion and misunderstanding as we go—and sometimes real damage. This is an increasingly complex world, and we are fed more and more information about more and more corners of it, faster and faster every year. We are reactive, not reflective, and it shows in our public discourse and in our politics. On our best days, we are emotional more than we are rational, and these have not been our best days.

But the world belongs to us. We could take a moment. We should take a moment. We should take all the time we need to think about the world, and to think about how we’re thinking about it, and where our ideas come from, and whether those ideas are good and helpful. We should take the time we need to write, and erase, and rewrite…and then walk away to get some fresh air and listen to, I don’t know, a bird or two…and then come back and look at what we’ve written. To look at what we think.

We matter. What we think about the world matters. What we think about the world affects what we do in the world, and to the world. It’s the only world we’ve got. And our life in it is the only life we’ve got. Don’t you think it’s worth more than a first draft?

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