![]() ![]() “We are also wired for ‘play.’ Under the right circumstances, writing allows us to do both of these things at the same time.” ![]() “As human, we are wired to communicate,” Warner writes. People keep asking me about AI and I really think how you feel about AI comes down to whether you believe art is about producing things (images, objects, data files, “content”) or about a way of operating in the world as an intellectual, spiritual, and emotional creature.Īs Warner puts it, writing “is an embodied process that connects me to my own humanity, by putting me in touch with my mind, the same way a vigorous hike through the woods can put me in touch with my body.”Įmphasis on embodied. This strikes me as excellent advice not just for teachers, but for writers and artists of all kinds. Some of his suggestions are to “make the work worth doing,” to “value the process, rather than the product,” and to “move away from what an algorithm can do and towards how humans learn and develop.” “Now we know we have to undo that mistake.” “We made a mistake thinking it was a good thing to train students to write like an algorithm,” he writes. Warner’s big idea is that students aren’t actually being asked to “express express themselves inside a genuine rhetorical situation (message/audience/purpose)” but are rather being asked to produce “writing-related simulations, utilizing prescriptive rules and templates (like the five-paragraph essay format)” which do fine on standardized tests, but don’t prepare them for writing at the college level, or writing anything that, you know, an actual human being would want to read. ![]() Warner wrote a followup post, “ ChatGPT can’t kill anything worth preserving” that is also worth your time. (James Brown summarized this as “ Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing.” It has become the default setting in American life.) I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s the highlight for me: He tweeted a really excellent thread about how AI’s “correct-seeming” prose is an opportunity to rethink and improve how we teach students writing. The title of this post was stolen from John Warner, whose book Why They Can’t Write was recommended to me by a friend. ![]()
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