Teaching writing in the chatbot era

[ergophobe]

Interesting reflection by Cory Doctorow on his time as a visiting something at Cornell.

And that's what I've been thinking about since September. Because of course those students cheat on their writing assignments – they are being taught to hit mechanical marks with their writing, improving their sentence structure, spelling and punctuation. What they're not learning is how to use writing to order and hone their thoughts, or to improve their ability to express those thoughts. They're being asked to write like a chatbot – why wouldn't they use a chatbot?

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/07/delicious-pizza/

That's pretty much how I see all the consternation about students "cheating." If the one thing that I grade my students on is how fast they can light a fire and how hot it gets, I shouldn't complain that they use gasoline and matches instead of flint and steel and tinder.

[Brad]

Somebody pointed out online (I forget where) that one key to learning good writing is reading a lot of books by really good authors.

[ergophobe]

Indeed, that is oft-repeated advice that authors have given since before there was an online.

Being a good reader is essential but not sufficient to becoming a good writer.

I think you see the same with musicians. Every good musician I know has broad and eclectic music tastes. But you still have to practice.

Doctorow is addressing what kind of practice young writers need and how poorly that is being delivered by universities. In particular he is discussing how the form of writing instruction offered by high schools and universities has always been poor but since there was no competition, it was acceptable. And since it evaluates to a standard easily achieved by chatbots, it is doomed.

Chatbots have laid bare how deficient that instruction is, but the response of faculty is to accuse the students of cheating.

Doctorow's point is that accusing students of cheating is a dead end. Again, AI means the death of mediocrity and university writing instruction tends to be mediocre. So you can either close ranks and complain that students are cheating or pivot to instruction that is actually useful. But useful instruction in writing is expensive because it doesn't scale well.

One detail he misses - at my grad school, the freshman writing program was gutted because the writing TAs comprised most of the union.  By getting rid of a lot of writing sections, they broke the union.

[rcjordan]

To save "western civilization," we must not let college kids read some of its classical texts.

Texas Plato Massacre - by Doktor Zoom - Wonkette
https://www.wonkette.com/p/texas-plato-massacre

[ergophobe]

To be fair, Socrates WAS executed for corrupting the youth and Plato WAS his chief apologist.

It looks like their nefarious pasts have finally caught up with them. It's about time.