Clearing Out the Crap

 Whew! This is the second night in a row that I've nearly forgotten to blog here. Usually this means that I've been writing in some other venue. 

I read somewhere once that every writer has about a million words of crap in them that they have to get through before they start writing good stuff. I write this blog in part to clear out my own backlog of crap-words. 

Most days this blog helps get the gears of writing and thinking going. On some days--like yesterday and today--my work in other areas of my life has obliged me to write already. I wrote a sermon yesterday. I wrote several backgrounder bits for my PhD seminar today. My writing brain thus tells me I've done my exercises for the day.

But no--discipline demands that I write here as well.

I find myself reclaiming and re-preaching the gospel I once evangelized about constantly: writing is a mode of thinking. My students come to me mainly with the misconception that writing consists of the one-time report you make about what's already in your head. So much of the writing they've been expected to do has them regurgitate information they've been taught. Writing really does function as a report in those cases. Do you know the respiration cycle? Explain it to me in a paragraph. Such writing has its place.

But I find students run into a wall when they attempt that kind of writing for classes like mine that require them to create, structure, and communicate an argument or an analysis. They sit down to write what they assume already exists in their head--another report--and find instead they don't know what they think about it. The mental report they want simply to copy onto the Google Doc or Word Doc? It doesn't exist. 

These students (and, to be fair, many students already know or sort-of know this already) miss the idea that writing functions as a way of finding out what we think. It's a tool for thinking, not reporting. 

I had drifted away from this truth in my teaching. Sure, I would tell students they need to take lots of notes, do a lot of pre-writing, before attempting an analysis. But few of them actually seemed to take that advice. Students lead busy lives. They don't necessarily see the benefits of doing writing as thinking. After all, writing takes energy and time. It's exhausting, like calisthenics. And, as in calisthenics, writing seems so much harder for students who have avoided it. Their writerly muscles lack the strength and stamina for long runs of productive writing. 

I recognize that, in my classes now, I'm asking them to start doing pushups when they really dislike pushups. 

Nevertheless, I persist. Why? Generative AI. Among my many gripes--some curmudgeonly, some more well founded, I fixate currently on the fact that Generative AI/LLMs sell themselves as an end-run around the hard work of writing. Why do all those pushups, lift all those weights, train in all those HIIT cardio rounds, when you can just ask Gemini or Claude to produce the report you'd eventually have gotten to? But the end-run around the work of writing also misses the benefits of thinking. As sci-fi author Ted Chiang argues, having AI write for you is like bringing a forklift to the gym. Sure, the weights get lifted, and--hurrah--you feel no aches, but your muscles don't develop. You miss the point of a gym in the first place. 

I've explained this to students. Some get it. Some nod and seem to at least consider it. And others, I know, will simply decide that they would prefer not to do that exercise, thank you very much. 

Anyway. No great writing or thinking tonight, I fear. But at least there's some crap cleared out for future thinking.