In Defense of Long Writing

In Defense of Long Writing

When the Williams College Museum of Art launched a program providing original works of art to students to hang in their dorm rooms for a full semester, I wrote a piece for the college website about the institution’s inherent trust in students being what allowed them the opportunity for what the museum’s director called “long looking.” The idea is that to fully understand a piece’s impact, you have to spend real time with it. To look at it at different times of day, under different qualities of light, when you’re tired, hungry, sad, happy. That only after looking and re-looking at an object can its effect on you be fully realized. In other words: It takes time, and a return to an idea, to understand what you really think about it. 

Now, as the college’s writing center director, I have come to see that writing academic papers is the equivalent of long looking at one’s own ideas. I once believed the worst thing AI could do to academic writing was tempt students to bypass that process. I was wrong. What’s worse: Some faculty are now fundamentally changing how they teach, asking for fewer—or no—written assignments to be completed outside of class. I am dismayed that these faculty are allowing AI to strip them of their trust in students, stealing from students the opportunity for long looking at their ideas.

Some faculty report feeling depressed about this change in how they approach teaching—they know how important paper writing was to them when they were in college—but nonetheless are choreographing this loss. One such colleague is teaching a tutorial, a course structure adapted from the Oxford style in which two students take turns either developing or critiquing an essay, lab report or problem set. The goal of the tutorial is to “sharpen critical thinking, improve writing, develop ideas, and defend positions,” according to the college website. But in the age of AI, this professor is asking students to write down their ideas longhand outside of class and come to meetings prepared to discuss them. There are no more lead or response papers, just handwriting and discussion. It’s what I would categorize as freewriting—an enormously useful tool in thinking, but hardly a final step.

I have long offered workshops for faculty on the value of freewriting, how it helps students focus before class discussion or summarize and retain what they’ve learned at the end of class. I talk about how writing isn’t a form of thinking; it is thinking. That in order to know what we really think about a topic, we need to write about it. I argue this is a universal human condition—though certain parameters must be met for it to work. The stakes must be lowered so you can feel less frantic about sounding smart or spelling correctly or saying exactly what you mean the first time. Then, when you put pen to paper or type words onto a screen, you’re able to work out what you think. I’ve watched the metaphoric light bulb ignite for students who didn’t think they had any ideas before they started freewriting—I know its magic. But freewriting is a first step in the writing process, not the destination.

The prospect that some students will only freewrite in college is more than depressing. I believe it is dangerous. That’s because deep thinking requires the struggle of revising, or re-seeing, your initial thoughts. It happens when you chew on an idea on a walk or in the shower and you have that aha moment when you remember something essential you meant to say but lost track of briefly, or make a connection you never would have if you hadn’t written that first draft and then sat with it for a time before revising. It happens after receiving feedback from your professor that points out ways you could clarify the argument or consider an alternative idea. To move beyond the first step of freewriting, students need the experience of writing away from others, the independence of reviewing feedback and making changes, the freedom to think about the topic over a longer period of time. That’s how intellectual development takes place.

Students have come to me in recent weeks worried because they’re not being asked to write at all. They say it feels their professors are taking the easy way out; in assuming some students will use AI, they’re shortchanging all students. These students find this condescending and are concerned about the long-term impacts on their thinking. They wonder aloud if they’re getting the education they were promised when they enrolled.

Writing is not the only way to think, of course, but it is the way thinking has happened in academia for centuries. And for good reason. The kind of thinking generated by academic writing—long, sustained thinking on one topic—requires the kind of intellectual struggle in which colleges and universities promise to train students so that those students can go out into the world prepared for analytical focus, perseverance and growth. Students who engage with this process no longer need to rely solely on their intelligence, but now also on their training in how to think. It’s what colleges promise students when they’re admitted, especially those with a graduation requirement in writing skills courses. Even in the age of AI, we still owe our students the chance for long looking, for long thinking and for long writing; the intellectual struggle and opportunity to re-see their initial ideas so that they may come to clearer, stronger, deeper ones.

Certainly, there are faculty continuing the tradition of teaching academic writing. Some say they prefer knowing a few students will slip by with AI-generated or -edited drafts so that the rest get to experience writing and revising a long paper, struggling with ideas, making connections. Others ask students to begin to draft their essays in class, but then send them off to revise those drafts outside of class, giving them time to think about their ideas more fully. The final written product is not what matters in these cases—writing a paper becomes less transactional—what matters is the process of long writing. I believe faculty who set this expectation of mutual trust, who want to see students’ thinking on the page, create an environment in which students participate fully in the work.

Writing, revising and rewriting are the foundation of intellectual growth because that whole complicated, messy process is what allows us to think, connect ideas and learn. It’s a tragedy that some consider AI to have caused a tectonic shift in education, when really it’s just a robot that has come to steal from us. I urge faculty not to let it.