When writing feels hard, perhaps it is because you are on the cusp of saying something significant or interesting? The thought is oddly comforting to me. Donald Murray originally described this connection in his essay “Making Meaning Clear: The Logic of Revision,” published in the Journal of Basic Writing in 1984. Murray wrote:
[I]n fact, syntax often breaks down just at the point where a new or significant meaning is beginning to break out of its shell. That meaning has an awkward and clumsy time of it, but if the writer listens carefully and nurtures the meaning, it may grow into significance. Or it may not. It may have to be put aside. But first it has to be understood before it can be rejected.
One concern about teaching writing in the age of AI is that generating a first draft that has surface-level plausibility and smoothness has now become very low-cost. As a result, for many practical real-world purposes, the task of collaborator with an AI-written first draft is to figure out how to edit the draft. But the AI tools are already good enough that they avoid obvious breakdowns in syntax. So how does the human AI-collaborator figure what kind of additional editing is needed?
My own (limited) experience in teaching writing is that when I offer copious comments, many students will respond to those comments in the most minimal way possible: that is, they alter the specific word or sentence I’ve pointed out, but otherwise leave the first draft untouched. They have not yet developed a sense that meaning can often be “awkward and clumsy,” as Murray puts it, and that you don’t fix awkward and clumsy by swapping out a few words. They don’t yet have a feel for the idea that good writing is more than avoiding errors in syntax.
Murray argues in his essay that teachers of writing should actually write in front of a class, to show students the series of erratic and continual adjustments that happen. In an AI age, it seems to me perhaps more useful for a teacher of writing to start from a text that has already been generated, whether by AI or a previous writer, and then to raise possible concerns and issues and discuss how one might address them. The challenge is to equip students with a set of questions that an editor would ask, so that they can see text as fluid.
In the past, teachers of writing have always encouraged students to revise their own work, and to say things like “writing is rewriting.” But in many classrooms, a draft that didn’t have errors in syntax was already treated as worth a B+ grade, maybe better. In an AI world–and especially the world outside the classroom–the AI-generated draft will often come first (or very early) in the process with the syntax already correct. In that setting, teaching editing is becoming more important than teaching writing, and one might even reverse the previous slogan and say that “rewriting is writing.”
