Recent advances in artificial intelligence might make this seem like a rhetorical question. What, indeed, is the point of spending hours writing your own sentences and paragraphs when a large language model can do it for you in seconds? I suspect, however, that writing now seems pointless to students, and even some scholars, because they were writing for the wrong reasons before the new technology arrived. It is quite common these days for writing instructors to try to shift the focus from the product to the process, and in a certain sense that’s also what I’d like to do, but I think the problem is mainly what we think the effect of writing is. What are we trying to bring about with our writing? What is the change we seek when we write?

One very natural way to answer this question is to think of the reader. We write in order to somehow affect the mind of our readers, whether to inform, enlighten, provoke, or entertain them. The change we seek is in the readership, i.e., the population of people who read our texts. At a broader level, we might say that we’re trying to influence “the conversation”; we’re trying to change the way a topic is talked about, shift the agenda, raise new questions, reframe the issues. After our text is published, we imagine, people will have accommodate its rhetoric. We may not yet have changed their minds, but something will at some point have to give. We have made a contribution.

A much more cynical answer is to focus on the name we make for ourselves when we write. We write in order to occupy a position in the discourse, to become a recognized “author” on the subject. In this category of answers are also things like writing to sell books and writing to build your list of publications. Writing to be cited would also count in this category, as would the students quest for a good grade. To have have such reasons is not in itself shameful, but it doesn’t point you toward a solution to the problem of writing well. There are too many “tricks of the trade” that will reach these kinds of goals but have little to do with the quality of your writing.

Importantly (for this post, anyway) is that both sorts of reasons are also increasingly going to be reasons to let AI do your writing for you. Language models are only going to get better, and since they are trained on the very discourse you are either trying to affect or impress, their competence to reach your goals may often be greater than your own. If these are your main reasons to write, then, you will find them more and more useful.

The obvious alternative that I’m heading towards is to seek reasons to write within yourself, rather than in your environment. Write for the clarity it brings or the pleasure it affords. Write because it improves your mind, not the minds of your readers. In the future, as most of the prose we need to get by (the prose that stores and transmits useful information) is produced by machines, we will write for the same reason that we swim, rides bikes, jog, go to the gym. It will be something that we enjoy doing (most of the time) and makes us better able to accomplish (and enjoy) our other activities. It will keep us mentally — indeed, spiritually — healthy. A serious scholar (and a serious student) will attend to the reading and writing much as serious athlete attends to their diet and exercise.

It will also open our thinking to criticism from qualified peers. But that is something I harp on about often enough. Today, let me just remind you that learning that you’re wrong is still learning. Enjoy that too.