Alx

Here's the thing about every successful writing workshop I've been in: they don't necessarily make writing enjoyable (indeed, they can be painful), but they make it profoundly satisfying. When you repeatedly sit down with the same writers, week after week, to think about what went wrong with their work, and how they can fix it, and to hear the same about your work, something changes in how you relate to your work. You come to understand how to transform big, inchoate ideas into structured narratives and arguments, sure – but you also learn to recognize when the structure that emerges teaches you something about those big, inchoate ideas that was there all along, but not visible to you.

It's revelatory. It teaches you what you know. It lets you know what you know. It lets you know more than you know. It's alchemical. It creates new knowledge, and dispels superstition. It sharpens how you think. It sharpens how you talk. And obviously, it sharpens how you write.

The freshmen comp students I've taught over the years were amazed (or, more honestly, incredulous) when I told them this, because for them, writing was a totally pointless exercise. Well, almost totally pointless. Writing had one point: to get a passing grade so that the student could advance to other subjects.

I'm not surprised by this, nor do I think it's merely because some of us are born to write and others will never get the knack (I've taught too many writers to think that anyone can guess who will find meaning in writing). It's because we don't generally teach writing this way until the most senior levels – the last year or two of undergrad, or, more likely, grad school (and then only if that grad program is an MFA).

Writing instruction at lower levels, particularly in US high schools, is organized around standardized assessment. Students are trained to turn out the world's worst literary form: the five-paragraph essay:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3749

The five-paragraph essay is so rigid that any attempt to enliven it is actually punished during the grading process. One cannot deviate from the structure, on penalty of academic censure. It's got all the structural constraints of a sonnet, and all the poetry of a car crusher.

The five-paragraph essay is so terrible that a large part of the job of a freshman comp teacher is to teach students to stop writing them. But even after this is done, much of the freshman comp curriculum is also formulaic (albeit with additional flexibility). That's unavoidable: freshman comp classes are typically massive, since so many of the incoming students have to take it. When you're assessing 100-2,000 students, you necessarily fall back on formula.

Which brings me back to that faculty discussion at Cornell, where we learned first that students want to learn, but are afraid of failure; and then heard from the freshman comp teacher, who told us that virtually all of their students cheated on their assignments, getting chatbots to shit out their papers.

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?

You can't teach students to write – not merely to create formally correct sentences, but to write – through formal, easily graded assignments. Teaching writing is a relational practice. It requires that students interact extensively with one another's work, and with one another's criticism. It requires structure, sure – but the structure is in how you proceed through the critiques and subsequent discussion – not in the work itself.

This is the kind of thing you do in small seminars, not big lecture halls. It requires that each student produce a steady stream of work for critique – multiple pieces per term or semester – and that each student closely read and discuss every other student's every composition. It's an intense experience that pushes students to think critically about critical thought itself. It's hard work that requires close supervision and it only works in small groups.

Now, common sense will tell you that this is an impractical way to run a freshman comp class that thousands of students have to take. Not every school can be Yale, whose Daily Themes writing course is the most expensive program to deliver with one instructor for every two students:

https://admissions.yale.edu/bulldogs-blogs/logan/2020/03/01/daily-themes

But think back to the two statements that started me down this line of thinking:

1) Most students want to learn, but are afraid of the financial ruin that academic failure will entail and so they play things very safe; and

2) Virtually all freshman comp students use AI to cheat on their assignments.

By the time we put our students in writing programs that you can't cheat on, and where you wouldn't want to cheat, they've had years of being taught to write like an LLM, but with the insistence that they not use an LLM. No wonder they're cheating! If you wanted to train a graduating class to cheat rather than learn, this is how you'd do it.

Teaching freshman comp as a grammar/sentence structure tutorial misses the point. Sure, student writing is going to be bad at first. It'll be incoherent. It'll be riddled with errors. Reading student work is, for the most part, no fun. But for students, reading other students' writing, and thinking about what's wrong with it and how to fix it is the most reliable way to improve their own work (the dirty secret of writing workshops is that other writers' analysis of your work is generally less useful to you than the critical skills you learn by trying to fix their work).

The amazing thing about bad writing is that it's easy to improve. It's much easier than finding ways to improve the work of a fluid, experienced writer. A beginning writer who makes a lot of easily spotted mistakes is a beginning writer who's making a lot of easily fixed mistakes. That means that the other writers around the circle are capable of spotting those errors, even if they're just starting out themselves. It also means that the writer whose work is under discussion will be able to make huge improvements through simple changes. Beginning writers can get a lot of momentum going this way, deriving real satisfaction from constant, visible progress.

Replacing freshman comp with dozens of small groups run like graduate seminars is expensive and hard to imagine. But it would create a generation of students who wouldn't use an AI to write their essays any more than they'd ask an AI to eat a delicious pizza for them. We should aspire to assign the kinds of essays that change the lives of the students who write them, and to teach students to write that kind of essay.

Freshman comp was always a machine for turning out reliable sentence-makers, not an atelier that trained reliable sense-makers. But AI changes the dynamic. Today, students are asking chatbots to write their essays for the same reason that corporations are asking chatbots to do their customer service (because they don't give a shit):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice

I'm not saying that small writing workshops of the sort that changed my life will work for everyone. But I am saying that teaching writing in huge lecture halls with assignments optimized for grading works for no one.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/07/delicious-pizza/#hold-the-gravel

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg