Why Does Writing Matter?

Today is the National Day On Writing, an event celebrated by the National Council of Teachers of English, which is a group I'm rather pissed at these days, but we'll get back to that later, because I think writing is hugely important. I've written a whole manuscript about it  and the following is in part adapted from that (if you're a publisher or agent who wants to give it a look, just let me know). 

One of the oldest challenges of being human is both simple and profound. We are each individually locked into our own fleshy container; we are filled with ideas and emotions and images and impressions and memories, things we’ve experienced and things we’ve learned that we want to share with other humans, and yet we have no easy way to do that. We cannot project our thoughts and experience into another brain directly.

We are mysterious creatures, wonderfully and terribly made, our minds and thoughts and feelings trapped inside our bodies, and we spend our whole lives trying to master the business of making ourselves intelligible to the other body-bound souls around us. So we created systems of symbols, first of sound and then, later, of marks on a page to represent those sounds and the symbols they represent.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King answers the question “What is writing” with a simple line.

“Telepathy, of course.” And later, “a meeting of the minds.”

We dream of telepathy, mind-reading, of magical or technological ways to bridge the gap between ourselves and the selves of others. We talk. We sing. We dance. We draw. We create entire languages and then expand and refine them in an attempt to make them better signifiers of everything bouncing around inside of us. And we write.

It is one of our most miraculous achievements. By making those marks on a page, we can cast our thoughts, our ideas, our feelings out across space and time.

But—and this is a big but—language, especially in written form, is both the most common and the most mysterious of human activities. It is an imperfect tool for making thought visible. We have no means to measure its effectiveness and accuracy, and we spend countless hours trying to interpret through the noise and parse the wording attempts of our fellow humans. “What did she mean by that?” can consume hours, even days.

That’s a central problem of education, where teachers are charged with reading the minds of their students. We can never be 100% certain that a student is truly and accurately communicating what’s in their head, because the only measure we have of what’s in their head is their communication. On any given day, we might be assessing what they hold in their head, or we might actually be assessing how well they are communicating it.

In many disciplines, we have worked our way around that central challenge. I can use straightforward objective measures to check for basic recall—do you recognize the desired piece of information when you see it? I can use performative tasks to create mini-artifacts of learning—what are the answers to these math problems?

But written language is the most complex and deep of human activities, and as soon as we try to reduce it to a simple performance or require that students produce an easily-measured artifact, we lose the plot. Asking students to perform a stripped-down version of writing, to write so that we can assess them (or worse yet, that some machine can assess them), is not the same as asking them to write for real.

Writing is thinking made concrete and visible. But by focusing only on the concrete and visible artifact of writing, and not the origin and process of its creation, the thinking behind it, we open the door to many other methods—non-thinking methods—to produce that artifact. And that’s where all our troubles, including those exacerbated by chatbots, began.

Writing is how we reach outside of ourselves, across distance and time, and so it is hugely powerful. Which is why it's sad that some people squander that power by using it not to communicate, but to coerce, control, and manipulate. Not to connect, but to grasp and push. 

Students deserve to experience writing as a very human way of connecting and communicating with other humans, not as an empty performance, the crafting of an artifact that has no meaning except to prove you can craft an empty artifact and trade it for certifications attesting to your compliance. It is this empty performative approach that made writing instruction easy prey for generative AI--a program that excels at constructing empty artifacts. 

If education is going to be about helping students grow into their best selves, taking hold of what it means to be fully human in the world, then it must include real writing.