By now, anyone connected to the academic world has undoubtedly heard the familiar, increasingly desperate plea from teachers, professors, and writers alike: Please do not use artificial intelligence to write for you. <\/p>\n
Anne Lovering Rounds, a professor of English at Hostos Community College within the City University of New York, knows this plea all too well. Like many of her peers across the country, she has codified the warning directly into her course syllabus, dutifully utilizing the boilerplate language suggested by her institution: \u201cThe use of generative AI tools such as but not limited to ChatGPT is prohibited on all assignments and assessments in this course.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like educators everywhere, Rounds admits she is thoroughly exhausted by reading student essays that uniformly claim to \u201cdelve\u201d into the literary texts assigned for class, or that formulaically argue the reading \u201cisn\u2019t X\u2014it\u2019s Y.\u201d But as Rounds and other academics observe, the standard, reactive arguments against using artificial intelligence in the English classroom are, in a word, cringe. Rather than merely being a technological nuisance, AI is forcing a profound pedagogical crisis. More importantly, however, it is exposing an equally severe crisis in what modern educators believe English courses can actually accomplish, and how those courses are fundamentally described and structured.<\/p>\n
As generative artificial intelligence tools show no signs of slowing down or disappearing from the academic landscape, this moment presents a rare and urgent chance to change the professional and public conflation of three distinct pillars: literary appreciation, knowledge of literary history, and formal essay writing. <\/p>\n
Each of those things is entirely distinct from the others, yet in standard academic curricula, the distinctions are often systematically disappeared. Consider, for example, the title of the introductory course Rounds teaches, which serves as a mandatory requirement for every student at her college: Literature and Composition. The longer she spends in the physical and virtual classroom, the more acutely she feels the fuzziness\u2014and the crushing burden\u2014of that simple conjunction \u201cand.\u201d <\/p>\n
Reading complex literary texts for the very first time, learning about the existence of specialized literary devices, and logically describing their distinct effects in shorter-form responses is frankly an immense amount of cognitive weight for students who are entirely new to literary study to take on all at once. A course plainly titled Literary Appreciation or Identifying Literary Techniques would certainly have more than enough substantive material to cover over the span of a semester. Furthermore, students enrolling in such classes would understand on a much more granular level what they were actually signing up to study and master.<\/p>\n
The fine details that professors love showing students for the very first time\u2014such as the fact that rhythm and rhyme are not the same thing, though they frequently go together; that meter is significantly more than just counting the number of syllables in a given line of verse; or that a line break is the defining structural feature of a lyric poem\u2014have virtually nothing to do with composing formal academic essays. And crucially, they do not have to. <\/p>\n
If educators had the institutional freedom to elucidate and drill down deeply into the intrinsic details of the texts without constantly worrying about accumulating stacks of student pages and deliverables, there would be no more widespread hand-wringing over whether an algorithm wrote the essay. Expecting students to write well, let alone expertly, about complex literary texts they are encountering for the absolute first time is a remarkably unrealistic demand. It is akin to asking a total musical novice to ace a drop-the-needle test on the entire sweep of classical music after just 15 weeks of instruction, while simultaneously demanding that they learn how to play a symphonic instrument.<\/p>\n
The broader cultural conversation surrounding the value of the humanities often glosses over these practical realities. Frank Bruni, a prominent opinion contributor for The New York Times<\/em>, recently rhapsodized about the enduring intellectual benefits of majoring in English during an opinion piece. <\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ll better understand the seeds of creativity and how they\u2019re made to flower. You\u2019ll swim in a borderless sea of thoughts beautifully expressed,\u201d Bruni wrote in defense of the discipline. \u201cThe wetter you get, the more expert you\u2019ll be at shaping stories, at persuading, and I can\u2019t imagine any profession or any world in which better communicators aren\u2019t better off.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet this perspective immediately raises a foundational question: What, precisely, is a better communicator in the modern landscape? Is it a more succinct emailer, a more entertaining giver of corporate presentations, or a more precise and evocative poet? Many educators, including Rounds, confess they are no longer entirely sure. <\/p>\n Nevertheless, understanding the fundamental seeds of creativity seems fundamentally different from shaping extended stories or producing polished, written argumentative text on demand. An English department should rightfully have ample room to teach each of these individual skills, but it might take considerably longer than a single semester to arrive at a genuine, positive feedback loop between reading appreciation and writing execution. In the meantime, educators might pause to recognize a historical precedent: when Socrates engaged in deep philosophical dialogue with his interlocutors, they certainly did not have to write a formal paper about the exchange in MLA format afterward.<\/p>\n It will undoubtedly be a sad day for the humanities if English teachers eventually abandon the traditional academic essay altogether. However, the vital first step toward saving the essay is to frankly admit that vivid, logical writing does not inherently need to be about literature, and conversely, reading and appreciating literature does not automatically need to come packaged with a heavy writing tax. <\/p>\n If educational institutions genuinely want young people to learn how to write rigorous essays, they should simply call the course Writing Essays. If administrators want young people to know the historical source of famous literary lines\u2014such as understanding where the phrase \u201cOut, damned spot\u201d originates\u2014there is still plenty of rich material to cover in a dedicated Shakespeare course, even without assigning endless pages of analytical essays by the end of the semester, and there remain plenty of rigorous ways to teach it. <\/p>\n Similarly, if institutions want students to write sophisticated essays about literary texts, they must acknowledge that this process requires a sustained, supportive environment to do effectively\u2014perhaps an environment that not every college can realistically offer or that every student wants to inhabit. That honest realization beats the ongoing falsehood that cramming intensive reading and extensive writing assignments into every semester-limited general education course, and simply labeling it the humanities, is ever going to make mastery happen organically.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By now, anyone connected to the academic world has undoubtedly heard the familiar, increasingly desperate plea from teachers, professors, and writers alike: Please do not use artificial intelligence to write for you. 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