This is a fantastic piece on why writing to think is so important and how it’s not GenAI’s fault that we are all engaged in formula writing.

I encourage you to take the time to read it. Here is a snippet of a few parts that called out to me. I also plan to go read Didion and Orwell’s pieces.

The messier human mode is bypassed in favor of following a formula to gain a reward – a move to perverse incentives. 

Once something can follow the formula faster, why not use it – a move with no incentive. 

Students became trained to write before AI was given training data to help it ‘learn’ how to write essays for students.

The technology is not the driver. The driver is a glorification of efficiency, productivity, and external reward that has crept into education, a field whose core values are NOT about any of those things.

(Source: COMMENTARY by Adrian Lenardic and Johnny Seales, “Why Write?”)

There is so much more to reflect on in this piece. When I reflect on all the writing I have done for work, for school since I started writing book reports in 7th grade…much of it followed formulas I created to make producing the writing easier. My appreciation of writing came about in graduate school, when I wrote short reflection pieces…but I have always written to get an end product. I forget if it was Peter Elbow or Bill Stott, but that writing was about selling a piece.

Blogging was useless writing, what I called junk blogging…no purpose or payment, totally free. I don’t count what I write for work as blogging I do here…that’s for pay, right? There, getting it done counts more than anything else.

Formula Writing

Formula writing has always been a boon to my writing, even when I enjoyed it and thought my way through the mind’s maze. Perhaps, there is a rarified writing that Orwell and Didion engaged in that I never saw.

Sitting down to write now for me, at work, is of capturing an idea as quick as I can, then moving the piece off the assembly line.

In this way, “assembling writing” as Magliozzi and Peterson describe in “AI in the Writing Workshop” is an apt term. But I am the assembler.

Sure, AI chatbots can also assemble, much quicker than I. I give an AI my writing formula for something and it can fill the blanks in quite well. But I still test how it resonates against my inner ear….

Writing to think is hard work. Writing to make a product for school or work is easier…GenAI can help with both but I imagine an employer will get their widgets any way they can at the lowest cost. Did we expect anything different?