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.

My advice to students and scholars who want to take control of their writing process is to imagine the academic year as four eight-week periods of discipline, separated by short, one-week breaks in the fall and spring, and longer six- and twelve-week breaks at Christmas and over the summer. During those 32 weeks of discipline, the idea is not to be maximally productive but to be maximally deliberate about your writing. You will write, or not write, on any one of the 160 working days (I’m assuming, on average, a 5-day work week) only when and what you have decided to write. You will not demand of your muse the spontaneous, miraculous production of prose during that time. You will, as Stephen King advises, simply tell your muse where s/he can find you and show up at the appointed time.

For many people, this all seems well and good “in an ideal world”, but assumes a degree of control over their time that they don’t feel they have. My first answer is to remind them that, whether they are teachers or students, they probably expect to be able to show up for class on time on most days. They know where and when they will be for their lectures. Also, they surely expect to have time out of class to read. That is, for an academic (whether student or scholar) a semester is period when they expect to be able to “attend” their classes, that is, apportion their attention to some degree. If you want to improve your discipline, you have to begin with an image of your conditions that make it possible.

Next, appreciate the finitude of the problem. We are talking about 160 days and you will be writing at most 3 hours (6 paragraphs, 3 pages) on any given day. You may write for only half an hour (or even twenty or fifteen minutes) or you may write nothing at all, but you will do so — you will write or not write — deliberately. And we can define exactly what we mean by “deliberately” here. At the end of every day, you will decide what to write about something you knew to be true last week or you will decide not write. You may decide you don’t have time tomorrow or you may be unable to think of anything to write about. But you will spend a few minutes at the end of your day making a conscious decision.

That moment at the end of the day is the key to beginning to build your discipline. I have come to calling it Discipline Zero. It actually isn’t the discipline of starting but the discipline of stopping. End your day of study deliberately. And end each of your writing moments deliberately too. Knowing that you are are able to stop will make it easier to begin. So, the easy answer to the question, “How do I get started?” is introduce that moment at the end of the day to your regular routine. Take a few minutes to think about what you will write tomorrow. Even (and especially) if you think you lack the time and knowledge to begin writing, end your day by deciding you won’t write tomorrow. Look in your calendar, think of your knowledge base as it looked last week, decide that you lack the necessary resources to compose half a page about something you know. Then call it quits for the day and enjoy your evening.

If you really do want to get your writing under control, I suspect you won’t let many days pass like this. One afternoon or evening, when you end your day, you will realize that half an hour is not a lot to ask of yourself, and that you’ve known thousands of truths for many years, any of which could well become a paragraph given a deliberate moment. Decide to write one of those.

When they first encounter it, many writers see my advice as a critique of their usual, habitual ways of writing. The approach I propose is very different from what they normally do; they think that I’m telling them they’ve been “doing it wrong” all this time, that they should stop doing the things that have been producing their texts. In some cases, to be sure, I identify some bad habits and barriers to progress, practices and prejudices that they would do well to abandon if they want to improve either the quantity, quantity, or pleasure of their writing. But much of what people tell me they are doing isn’t actually bad for them. It’s just that they should also try some of the things I propose.

The best example of this is the very common practice of writing to discover what you think. Writers are so used to seeing their ideas materialize in front of them as they write, that they can’t imagine what it would be like to have an idea first, and only then setting about to write it down. My favorite analogy, of looking at your hand, posing it in a comfortable position, and then drawing a picture of it, seems utterly foreign to them when they think about the problem of writing a scholarly article. They think I’m telling them that all the “shitty drafts” they’ve been “thought writing” all these years are a complete waste of time. They should just make up their minds and write their ideas down. They think I don’t know how their minds work; i.e., that my mind works very differently from theirs.

This is not the case, of course. I, too, know what it is like to sit down in front of a blank page (a white screen with a blinking cursor) and seeing what comes out. My point is just that, at some point, something does come out: an idea forms, and now I know what to say. And, in fact, those ideas were not created in the moment of writing. It may seem that way, but a moment’s reflection will reveal that those ideas must have been “in me” somehow before I began. Where else could they have come from between the time I started writing and the time they appeared on the page? Let’s say I was “capable” of them when I began. I merely showed myself what I was capable of.

That experience is a valuable one, and it is not one that I propose you abandon. I do sometimes suggest that there are plenty of other ways of finding out what you know. You can go for a walk and think something through. You can talk to a good friend or colleague. You can draw a mind map or even an actual picture. You can reread a book. You can listen to an inspiring piece of music or cook a good meal or drink a good glass of wine. These are all activities that might suddenly bring to mind some thought you are capable of, some fact that you are knowledge-able about. Sometimes (as a kind of provocation) I suggest you consider all these activities as being on the same level: “Thought writing is as little writing as a going for a walk or talking to a friend,” I say. Go ahead and do it, but don’t call it writing!

Real writing, I then suggest, is what you do when you have both an idea and a reader firmly in mind. It is what happens when you address yourself to a peer in a deliberate moment of composition. “In classic style,” say Thomas and Turner, “the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the reader and writer are intellectual equals, and the occasion is informal.” We can argue about whether “classic style” and “academic style” are exactly the same thing; there are aspects of academic writing that they might call “reflexive” and “practical”. But the basic posture of telling a peer what you think is true is worth developing, worth strengthening through exercise. Sit down (but up straight!) for half an hour and present one of your ideas in 200 words or less with the intent of helping them to believe it, understand it, or overcome their objections to it. Present it, not as one who is in the throes of discovery, but calmly, with poise, as someone who knows what they’re talking about and who they’re talking to. Address the reader in a familiar, informal tone. Stand comfortably before them. Make it clear and simple.

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 that 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.

There’s been a lot of concern about the effect of generative AI on higher education lately.* I share most of these concerns, though I don’t like to frame the problem in terms of student “cheating”. To be sure, many students are using AI in ways that allow them to earn better grades than they deserve — their exam performance overestimates their actual competence — and in that sense they are cheating, often quite deliberately (in knowing violation of rules). But, as I’ve long argued, it’s almost impossible to design an exam or assignment that doesn’t encourage students to pretend to be a little more knowledgeable, a little more intelligent, a little more competent, than they actually are. They may write as though they have read an entire book that they may only briefly have skimmed. They may write as though they’ve read a play when they’ve only read the Coles Notes or the Wikipedia article. Ideally, this would be detectable in the superficiality of their treatment, but surely you’ll admit that we often let them get away with it.

Indeed, as scholars, we often let each other get away with superficial readings of the literature — with prose like a context widow, i.e., prose that might as well have been generated by a large language model. Let’s admit that many of us think of scholarly discourse as an “attention space” and that it is our job mainly to make a “contribution” to it. We’re always looking for a “gap” and fit words to fill it with. Research is less the art of satisfying our curiosity than the business of coming up with something to say. George Orwell, of course, suggested quite a different image: our prose should be like a window pane through which we provide a clear view on what we are thinking. Writing is not merely the act of stringing together a “predictable” sequence of words in order to bring about a series of conventional effects in the mind of the reader. If, as Wittgenstein suggested, “we make ourselves pictures of the facts,” our writing presents those pictures to our peers for their careful consideration and critique. As I had occasion to explain a few years ago, the conceit of the scholar is not that their writing represents the facts but that we have a number of thoughts about those facts.

Norman Mailer once described “ego” as the “state of our psyche that gives us the authority to tell us we are sure of ourselves when we are not.” It is relatively easy to be brave in writing (which no doubt explains the famously toxic environment of social media. Would that conscience more often made cowards of us, let’s say!) Today, armed with a chatbot, students have it very easy indeed. They can write confidently of many things they know nothing of, indeed, things they have no real opinions about. So can we. But, now more than ever, we must write with the intention of exposing our thoughts to the criticism of our peers, and we must encourage our students to do the same. Only by telling each other what we actually think, not what it would be (statistically) “normal” to say, can we learn whether what we believe is true or false. We must be sure of ourselves long enough to find out whether our confidence is warranted.

I have decided to return to blogging because I need a space to work out what I think the future of academic writing can and should be. I agree with those who think that much of the crisis of AI is a result of our prose being out of shape, weakened by too many decades of “publish or perish” and “advanced placement,” unprepared to compete with the machines. But I don’t think all is lost yet. Mailer’s remark about the “ego” was inspired by Mohammad Ali’s “Fight of the Century” with Joe Frazier. I feel like it’s time to step back into the ring.

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*See Megan Fritts’ “A Matter of Words” (The Point Magazine); Zwi Mowshowitz’s “Cheaters Gonna Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat” (Don’t Worry About the Vase); D. Graham Burnett “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?” (The New Yorker); James Marsh’s “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College” (New York Magazine); and Phil Christman’s “Of Course Some Will Cheat” (Slate).