Being an academic doesn’t mean that everyone thinks you’re smart, I like to say; it means that a few smart people think you’re wrong. Addressing yourself to those people is the primary purpose of academic writing. That is, the purpose of academic writing is not to impress your peers (and certainly not your teachers) but to open your thinking to their criticism. This is why it is so important to do your own writing. By articulating your thoughts in prose — by “prosing your world” — you prepare yourself to learn what you are wrong about.

This isn’t as dramatic as it sounds. We expect academics not only to be knowledgeable but to be corrigible. They maintain what is known in an explicitly “logical” form, so that the consequences of changing our minds become conspicuous. It’s not we’re perfectly deductive in our thinking, but if we’re wrong about one thing, we’re probably wrong about others, and “knowledgeable” people are able to more quickly and easily discover those other errors and carry out the necessary repairs. That is, a knowledge-able person isn’t someone who holds (and professes) a bunch of true beliefs. It is someone who knows how to be wrong — how to admit it and move forward.

What consequences does this have for our style of writing? Well, first of all, we must be clear about what we actually think. The writing must clearly assert facts, i.e., claim that things stand in one way and not in another. It must also clearly state our reasons for believing those facts. These reasons are individual points on which the reader may disagree with the writer, potential errors that, by being made explicit, are now easy (for another knowledgeable person) to identify. In other words, academic writing must be clear about what we think the facts are and why we think they’re that way.

That is one of the reasons we should carefully cite our sources. Much of what we believe we believe because we have read (and believed) someone else. Our reader, however, may have read the same source and had their doubts. By declaring whose authority we’re invoking, we open ourselves to criticism of that authority. More subtly, but just as importantly, we open our reading of the source to such criticism. That is, our reader may have read and believed the same source but understood it differently. We write in order to expose our interpretations of each other’s work to criticism too.

Like I say, I want this to be an argument for doing your own writing. It is possible that a language model can predict exactly what you would say about certain subject, and therefore, in principle, expose the ideas those words would express to the criticism of your peers. But that criticism won’t touch you in the same if the ideas were never form, in those exact words, in your own mind. You will be unprepared to listen to the critique. If you find the criticism persuasive you will now have to reconstruct the argument the machine generated for you in your own mind before you can adjust your thinking.

Now, it’s possible that Calvino’s fantasy (horror?) of a “writing machine surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society” can serve this same purpose. But we must keep in mind that this would mean generating a series of variations and testing each one by reading it until we achieve a “particular effect of one of the permutations on a man endowed with a consciousness and an unconscious, that is, an empirical and historical man,” i.e., the academic whose writing we’re proposing to replace. This effort of internalizing artificially generated prose is surely more demanding (and more risky) than articulating what you really think yourself.