Writing as Honest Work
I miss teaching. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve taught regularly in universities, but I still think constantly about how to ensure students gain tangible skills and approach their work as a craft. Especially in light of [waves hands] all this.
It feels like an increasingly fusty position even as the public and the business world are both becoming more and more painfully aware of its importance. There’s an uncomfortable tension growing between upper-level business mandates to turn to AI tools and lower-level managements’ awareness that AI can’t do what’s being asked of it. But the pressure to be new and cutting edge and buy into the latest technological hype creates pressures that companies, students, and entry level employees also feel. The result? A sudden boom in business and financial articles decrying the deskilling of the incoming work force, many of whom don’t actually know what they’re doing, having become overly dependent on AI to do their work.
I’ve seen this problem before. AI might have come along as a problem after I taught my last university class, but outsourcing work without learning how to do or understand has a long and storied history, especially amongst the types of well-off students I regularly taught at Harvard. Historically, though, getting another human to write your papers for you costs money. AI has democratized deskilling, putting it within the reach of anyone with access to a computer.
Crass populists might imagine this as a win for the rest of us, but we’re seeing the consequences of going easy on our students in this particular way playing out in front of us on a grand political scale. I don’t mean we need to be SOBs with our students when they are in our classrooms. But I do think it’s important to remain committed to the principle that the entire point of an education is to learn, not just to get a degree that lands us a job. Not just to get a good grade. Not just to make the teacher happy. It is to learn and it is to gain skill. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are consequences to not knowing what the hell you are doing. When a well-to-do slacker skates through their education by foisting skill acquisition, knowledge accumulation, and understanding onto others, that has consequences. When someone like that enters a position of power — whether as a doctor, a lawyer, a consultant, a politician, or a CEO — people’s lives are literally in their hands. What does it mean when someone like that can’t even think their way out of a paper bag? What does it mean when they couldn’t tell you how a change to one part of that complicated system ripples out to affect the other parts of it? It is not a win for the rest of us to emulate mediocre haplessness. When we run things like this, people die.
Let me say that again, because I wasn’t exaggerating. When we run things like this? People. Die.
Now I’ll give it to the hard-headed practical types who think sitting in a classroom can’t make up for experience. This kind of understanding is not just intellectual. You can’t get it just from reading a book. Much of it is gained with practice. Much of the practice will come on-the-job, where you personally experience and see on the ground what happens when a change in one part of an organization or system affects other parts of it. We don’t usually teach that part in university. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t laying the groundwork for how someone approaches their on-the-job experience, and it doesn’t mean we aren’t teaching how to do work, or how to think. Ideally, a university education isn’t about teaching someone how to fake it. Instead, it is about teaching craft. It teaches how to produce quality material oneself. It teaches students how to think on their feet, how to improve what they need to improve, and how to take pride in their work.
I found myself thinking about this recently as a fly on the wall at a faculty Q&A where several professors were asked about how they objectively assess student writing. Their answers were as varied as they were, and listening to how seriously and deeply they responded really drove home how much I miss teaching and thinking about these things with my colleagues. There were so many things I wanted to jump in and say and think with them about teaching, and it was very difficult to bite my tongue as a visitor!
If I could have answered at the time, I would have said that, when I teach writing, I throw the notion of an “objective standard” out the window. Objective standards tend to try to create an external, universal standard. But any historian of science worth their salt can tell you that these are almost always someone projecting what works for them and then trying to naturalize it as if it were true and eternal in all situations. It says there’s a universal right way to think and write and then judges every student on how well they meet that standard. The problem with this is not just that it is horseshit — although it is — but also it fails to teach what students need to learn from a practical standpoint. It encourages students to try and copy the standard, whether or not they understand it. They look at the surface of the thing and try to make their writing look and sound the same, but in my experience, they frequently don’t understand what they’re saying or why they’re saying it when they do this. They’re saying it because they thought I said to say it. This is worse than useless. It’s teaching students to try and please. It teaches them to disguise their own voice and copy someone else’s. It teaches them to try and dress up in the right clothes without having anything of substance behind that window dressing. In cases where the student comes to me already good at the external standards, on the other hand, there’s usually very little to do with them. They just float by, bored, putting their energy into other classes instead of mine, making little to no progress in our time together.
This is why I start with the writing that each student is capable of producing when they come to me, working individually throughout our time together to improve that. The standard I am measuring them against is where they started, in other words, and how far they come. What we work on, then, will be different for every student. But the approach I use is the same and is a deepened version of the “compliment sandwich” approach that many grad students are taught when they’re thrown into the classroom. In this approach, you evaluate a student’s writing by starting off with a compliment, providing a suggestion for something they can correct, and then ending again with a compliment. But I want to spend a little time on my version of this, because I think it usually gets short-shrift as an “no-brainer” method for new teachers to implement and they’re not usually introduced to the hows and whys of using it well.
When students submit their first piece of writing to me, I identify 1 or 2 things that are the weakest and most immediately in need of correction. These are what we spend most of our time together working to improve, whether in subsequent drafts of this particular piece or in other assignments that follow. At the same time, I identify 2-3 things they are doing very well and draw their attention to these. This helps them feel a little more confident and less like I am attacking them. But it’s also important to do because I’ve noticed that students trying to fix “big” problems will sometimes accidentally lose or change the things they’ve been doing well in the process. It’s important for them to know where their strengths are so that they don’t do this, and even spend a little time now and then tweaking and building on their strengths. The compliments are not just about stroking the students’ egos and making the medicine go down more easily. They’re actually a key part of ensuring they know what works.
This is especially important because student writing when they come to me is frequently still intuitive and not intentional. They may be doing things well, but they don’t necessarily know that. They also frequently haven’t engaged in a lot of meta-cognition yet, where they think about thinking itself. They assume that their way of engaging with the world is natural and everyone does it, and they may not fully grasp their own unique intellectual gifts. Being able to spot these things are a great way to improve, not just students’ technical writing skills, but also their thinking skills. As an example, I once had a student whose writing was above average but not mind-blowing, but her use of adjectives was unbelievably spot on. Like just the perfect adjective in every situation. Adjectives are the emotional workhorse of writing. To be able to pick the right one so uncannily meant she had a keen eye for the extremely subtle and finely textured emotional meaning of situations. That’s not something everyone can do even with practice, much less as a 19 year-old. This ability clearly already served this student very well throughout her life, but when I drew her attention to it she was surprised! When she thought about it a bit, she realized that she had “always just been able to tell what people were feeling.” Being made explicitly aware of the fact that she used emotion as an important form of data for understanding the world gave her the opportunity to become intentional about how she thought about this kind of evidence. It also allowed her to begin thinking about the ways she may or may not want to make claims about emotion, affect, and feeling explicit in her intellectual arguments or keep them more subtly relegated to the background through the type of language choices she had already been making without realizing it. I have had other students, in contrast, who were wildly sharp at spotting the difference between what people do versus what they say, others who had an impeccable sense of logic, and still others who had a preternatural eye for which historical details mattered and which ones didn’t.
Encouraging students to recognize, keep, and further develop these existing strengths isn’t just a matter of making them feel warm and fuzzy. It’s about helping them grow as thinkers who have a distinctive way of seeing the world. All of these things — logic, details, emotions, people’s actions — are types of evidence. When we teach writing, we are not just teaching students to make words that sound pretty or follow an algorithm for outputting a formally structured essay, even though these things are very important! Rhythm, tone, grammar, rhetoric, and narrative pace are all part of what we do. But we aren’t just teaching them the mechanics of writing. We are also teaching them to think, to recognize different kinds of evidence and understand what you can and can’t do with each of those. Drawing attention to their strengths as strengths may make them feel good about their abilities, but it also makes clear that, as a specific ability, it isn’t the only way of understanding the world. Each of these strengths comes with limitations. There are things it can do, and things it can’t. That opens the door for students to identify ways they can reach beyond their comfort zones to become more rounded as thinkers.
When complimenting students’ writing, I aim for at least two if I can. When it makes sense, one of these emphasizes their thinking while the other emphasizes something more technical about writing mechanics. Maybe they have a strong voice, good cadence, or their essays are especially well-structured. There isn’t always a clean distinction between thinking and technical aspects, but overall I aim to include a mix of types of problems for them to attend to so that their progress is balanced and they understand that the purpose of learning writing is to get good at both types of skills.
When focusing on weaknesses, I work most on the two things that, if fixed, would most immediately make the student’s writing better. What are the most glaring problems that would give the student the most bang for the buck if they were fixed? Depending on the depth and type of the problem, as well as the students’ own ability to incorporate feedback quickly and effectively, we may spend the entire semester focusing on these two problems. Occasionally students will struggle to tackle the biggest problems, whether because the problem is a technically difficult one to overcome or because the student struggles to implement change gracefully. In these cases, it is worth identifying 1 or 2 issues that are middling but not terrible. Shifting efforts to easier wins can build students’ sense of accomplishment if they threaten to get overwhelmed or bogged down, and these smaller wins can be carried over to return to the hairier weaknesses at a later time. In cases where a student course corrects quickly, on the other hand, we can simply continue to add new issues to work on until our time together is done. Even the best writers in the world have things that they could improve or tweak. Refining one’s craft is not a thing that ever ends, something that people at the top of their game understand and embrace in their quest to do the best they can.
The benefits to approaching writing as a craft and not simply a final, black box of a product can’t be overstated. Not only do students learn how to incorporate feedback, take pride in their work and accomplishments, sharpen their thinking skills, and improve their own writing, but they also come to appreciate the ways that writing is crafted to do things. This makes them more attentive and savvy readers, ones who become more capable of spotting the ways that what they read has been intentionally designed to have effects on them. And that makes them more capable of deciding whether they want to say yes or no to the media they consume.
Given all this, is it any wonder that companies with something to sell have a vested interest in convincing us all that we don’t need to learn how to write? That it is a mindless task that can simply be offloaded to a tireless computer servant to do for us? That humanities teachers who believe in the value of writing — real writing, human writing, writing as a craft and a skill and an art — are just old-fashioned silly headed Luddites who don’t understand?
Should we be surprised, in other words, when people who never did a real day of work in their lives fail to see its value? People who’ve never once bothered to learn how work works don’t understand how teachers teach, writers writer, or thinkers think. And they are the last people you should trust to tell you anything meaningful about any of those things. When you peel back the pretty surface of their words and promises, there’s just….Nothing.
