A Way to Save the Essay

“This is the first time I really had to think through a paper.”

That’s what many of my students said after I replaced take-home essays in spring 2023 with a series of structured, in-class writing exercises that scaffolded the classic term paper.

Like most of higher education, my courses long relied on take-home essays as the primary way to assess critical thinking. Yet these essays were rarely the product of slow, careful reasoning. Many were stitched together from blogs and SparkNotes; others were riddled with errors, hastily written minutes before the 11:59 p.m. deadline.

The rise of AI only made obvious what was already true: The traditional college essay wasn’t working well. In fact, it often had a deformative effect on intellectual habits. For many students, it became a game of cobbling together something that looked like an essay—without careful reasoning or meaningful engagement with ideas. They learned to sound smart rather than think carefully, and were rewarded for polishing quick takes instead of developing real understanding.

So, it’s understandable when some colleagues argue for abandoning the essay altogether. If the take-home essay only trains students to assemble words and avoid genuine thought, perhaps it should die.

But before we bury the essay, we should ask: Was it the essay itself that failed—or the way it’s been taught and assessed? What’s broken is not the idea of writing as a tool for thinking, but a system that encourages shallow, hurried work. The solution isn’t to eliminate essays altogether—it’s to radically redesign how they’re taught.

That’s where slow-thinking pedagogy comes in.

Slow-Thinking Pedagogy

Big questions deserve slow, reflective thought. This approach rests on the belief that in today’s culture of convenience, students need deliberate help slowing down, wrestling with difficulty and sitting with the discomfort of not immediately knowing an answer.

Developing a thoughtful response to complex questions—whether it’s the mind-body problem or the implications of the Iraq War for American diplomacy—is not a task to be dashed off in an evening. For novices just entering these conversations, it should take a semester at minimum. That’s the first tenet of slow-thinking pedagogy: Good, critical thinking takes time.

The second tenet is that the essay should be scaffolded to reflect this reality. One effective structure looks like this:

• Students begin by researching their topic. They find peer-reviewed articles using the university library, print them out at home and bring them to class highlighted with marginal notes. They then produce a written annotation by hand, in class.
• Second, they develop a problem statement that maps the contours of a question or problem, charting dominant voices and the history of the debate. This requires more research from home. But again, the writing itself is done in class.
• Next, they craft and revise a thesis. They write the first version and humbly offer it for peer review. They get specific feedback to improve and try again. Students write, critique and review during scheduled class time.
• This is followed by an outline of their argument, which specifies the premises, evidence and sources they plan to incorporate. I provide students with a blank argument map they fill out. This helps them understand the premises in a good argument require a logical order; they don’t just hang together.
• Finally, they anticipate objections, develop replies and begin drafting—still in class.

This is what good writing looks like: It is a genuine struggle with ideas. It models that big questions don’t deserve fast, easy answers. Yes, it requires a substantial amount of class time. I use about 30 minutes every other week to devote to these exercises. I’ve developed a single workbook for my philosophy courses that outlines all these steps—including space to write and then reflect on their progress between sessions. From my own experience, I can say it is all working quite well.

The tradeoff, of course, is that there is less time to cover content. But if forced to choose between covering less content with depth and careful attention or more with a hurried drive to fit in as much as possible, I will pick less every time. It may well be the case that covering less and relishing the nuances of ideas is necessary for slow, critical thinking.

Real Formation, Not Quick Fixes

With this approach, students accustomed to skimming sources and rushing through last-minute essays are pushed into sustained intellectual work. Initially, many resist. They might groan. They may point out that other professors don’t require this. But midway through, something changes: They begin to care—deeply. Through the process, they know their thesis inside and out, recognize strengths and weaknesses and ask more thoughtful questions. They’ve invested themselves in their argument; it reflects their own hard-won understanding. This is something I can attest to, having used this method in my own courses.

Most importantly, this kind of formative struggle shapes habits of mind—patience, intellectual humility and resilience—and the skills needed to sustain those habits. Patience develops as students learn that good writing cannot be rushed; they must tolerate the slower pace of research, outlining and revision. Intellectual humility grows as they engage with complex arguments that challenge their assumptions and force them to rethink their positions. Resilience emerges as they face the discomfort of a draft that doesn’t yet work, push through setbacks and return to difficult ideas rather than abandoning them.

These virtues can’t be cultivated when students can instantly turn to the internet or a chatbot to bail them out—prompting ChatGPT to generate a list of ideas instead of brainstorming their own, asking it to summarize an article instead of wrestling with the text, or letting it draft paragraphs instead of learning to express complex reasoning in their own words. As we know, at some point, learning requires practicing these things independently for oneself. This is easy to conceptualize when we talk about piano or baseball—we know the player must eventually hold the bat and swing on their own. The same is true of these intellectual habits: they only develop when students do the slow, often uncomfortable, thinking themselves.

This process must be protected for the sake of organic intellect and raw human thought.

Integrating AI into higher education does not mean it must touch every corner of every classroom. Perhaps the truly innovative move is to designate certain spaces as AI-free—spaces where students think and write deliberately, and where intellectual virtues like patience, humility and resilience are cultivated without outsourcing them to machines.