Tag: teaching writing

Don’t teach writing. Teach the joy of writing.

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The objective of teaching students to write is not to ensure they create content that can be graded. It is to get them to engage with language and storytelling. This is not a new story. Students learn arithmetic even though there are calculators and spreadsheets. They learn spelling even though there are spelling checkers. And … Continued

Ethan Mollick required his students to use ChatGPT. Their experience is a model for the future.

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Ethan Mollick, associate professor at Penn’s Wharton School, required his students to use the AI writing tool ChatGPT in his classes last semester. You should definitely check out his description of the experience; it’s full of real-world insights that are far more valuable than the noodlings of naysayers. Start with the intention to learn Unimaginative … Continued

How realistic are universities’ plans to deal with ChatGPT?

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The New York Times published a piece regarding university policies and strategies for students using ChatGPT or similar tools to prepare coursework. For each strategy, I’ll assess how realistic it is and what the consequences might be. Articles like this one, as well as the policies they describe, are shortsighted, because AI text generation is … Continued

When AI tools like ChatGPT can write, how should we teach writing?

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ChatGPT undermines the traditional way we teach writing in high school or college. We can try (and fail) to preserve the old ways of teaching. Or we can develop new ways that assume future writers will have access to AI tools and help them to use those tools. Current ways we teach writing already stink … Continued

Could the five-paragraph essay be the reason we’ve forgotten how to think?

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David Labaree published a devastating takedown of the five-paragraph essay, that pernicious container that’s corrupting the teaching of writing everywhere. He’s made me wonder about my own rules and advice for writers. In my mind, writing and thinking are two sides of the same process. Separate the two, and thinking ceases to be important, which … Continued

John Warner talks sense about how to teach writing

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Finally, I found a writing teacher in higher education whose philosophy about teaching writing matches mine. But we still need to align how we teach writing with how people actually use it at work. John Warner teachers writing at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. In his piece “We Know How To Teach Writing” … Continued