By now, virtually anyone connected to the academic world has heard the familiar, increasingly desperate plea from teachers, professors, and writers alike: Please, do not use artificial intelligence to write your papers. <\/p>\n
For Anne Lovering Rounds, a professor of English at Hostos Community College, part of the City University of New York, this plea has long since crossed from conversational dialogue into official institutional policy. Like educators across the country, she has codified the warning directly into her course syllabus, dutifully relying on the boilerplate language provided by her administration. The standard warning reads: \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 many of her colleagues, Rounds admits she has grown utterly exhausted by the endless stream of formulaic student essays that predictably claim to \u201cdelve\u201d into assigned texts or attempt to argue that a piece of literature \u201cisn\u2019t X\u2014it\u2019s Y.\u201d Yet, she argues that the common arguments and knee-jerk restrictions against using artificial intelligence in the English classroom are, in a word, cringe. <\/p>\n
According to Rounds, generative AI is forcing an acute pedagogical crisis, but it is doing so by laying bare an equally profound pre-existing crisis in how modern education conceptualizes what English courses are actually meant to accomplish and how educators describe them to the public. As generative AI technology continues to advance rapidly with no signs of slowing down, this moment offers a rare and urgent opportunity to untangle the professional and public conflation of three entirely distinct academic pursuits: literary appreciation, the acquisition of historical literary knowledge, and the mechanics of essay writing.<\/p>\n
Each of those core areas\u2014appreciating literature, understanding its history, and composing analytical essays\u2014is fundamentally distinct from the others, yet in standard academic curricula, these lines are frequently blurred until the distinctions disappear entirely. <\/p>\n
To understand this phenomenon, one need only look at the title of the ubiquitous course Rounds teaches, which serves as a mandatory requirement for nearly every undergraduate student at her college: Literature and Composition. The longer she spends teaching in the classroom, the more acutely she feels the persistent fuzziness, as well as the crushing academic burden, carried by that single, unassuming conjunction: the word \u201cand.\u201d<\/p>\n
For students who are brand new to rigorous literary study, being asked to read complex texts for the very first time, learn about the existence and function of intricate literary devices, and then logically describe their aesthetic and structural effects in short-form responses is, frankly, a massive amount of cognitive load to absorb all at once. If departments offered courses plainly titled Literary Appreciation or Identifying Literary Techniques, instructors would certainly have more than enough rich material to cover. At the same time, students would understand on a much more granular, realistic level what they were actually signing up to study and master.<\/p>\n
The intricate details that Rounds genuinely loves revealing to students for the first time\u2014such as the fact that rhythm and rhyme are distinct musical elements even though they frequently go hand in hand; that poetic meter is far more complex than simply counting syllables in a line; or that the poetic line itself is the defining structural feature of a lyric poem\u2014have virtually nothing to do with the mechanics of composing a formal academic essay. Furthermore, they do not have to. <\/p>\n
If educators had the professional freedom to fully elucidate, explore, and drill down into the specific details of primary texts without constantly worrying about generating piles of student essay deliverables, the academic hand-wringing over whether an artificial intelligence program wrote a student’s paper would largely vanish. <\/p>\n
Expecting students to write insightful, expert-level essays about literary texts they are encountering for the very first time is a remarkably unreasonable expectation. It is comparable to asking a total musical novice to ace a complex drop-the-needle identification test covering centuries of classical music after attending only fifteen weeks of introductory lectures, while simultaneously requiring them to learn how to play a musical instrument from scratch.<\/p>\n
The debate over the value of the humanities was recently highlighted when Frank Bruni, an opinion contributor for The New York Times<\/em>, published a glowing column rhapsodizing about the enduring personal and professional benefits of majoring in English. <\/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 his 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 While Bruni\u2019s sentiment strikes a resonant chord among humanities advocates, it glosses over a fundamental pedagogical question: What, precisely, constitutes a better communicator in today’s world? Is it someone who writes more succinct, clear professional emails? Is it a more engaging and entertaining giver of corporate presentations? Or is it a more precise, evocative poet? Rounds admits she is no longer certain she knows the answer. <\/p>\n Nevertheless, understanding the foundational seeds of creativity seems fundamentally different from the distinct mechanical process of shaping stories or producing formal written text. An ideal English department should have ample room to teach each of these individual skills thoroughly. However, establishing a productive, positive feedback loop between appreciating literature and writing about it often takes far longer than a single traditional academic semester allows. In the meantime, Rounds suggests, society might do well to remember that when the ancient philosopher Socrates engaged in deep philosophical dialogues with his interlocutors, they were never required to write a formal research paper about the conversation formatted according to modern MLA guidelines.<\/p>\n It would certainly be a sad day for the humanities if English teachers and professors decided to abandon the traditional essay format altogether. However, Rounds contends that the very first step toward saving the essay\u2014and preserving the integrity of literary education\u2014is to openly admit that vivid, logical writing does not actually need to be about literature, and conversely, reading and studying literature does not inherently need to come burdened with a mandatory writing tax.<\/p>\n If universities and colleges genuinely want young people to learn how to master the art of writing compelling essays, they should simply call the course Writing Essays and focus exclusively on rhetoric and composition. If an institution wants young people to discover the source and cultural impact of famous literary quotations\u2014such as Lady Macbeth\u2019s immortal line, \u201cOut, damned spot!\u201d\u2014there is still an abundance of material to cover in a dedicated Shakespeare course, along with plenty of rigorous, engaging ways to teach it that do not rely on assigning endless pages of analytical essays by the end of the semester. <\/p>\n Ultimately, if educators want students to write sophisticated essays about literary texts, the academic community must acknowledge that doing so requires a sustained, supportive environment\u2014one that perhaps not every college can realistically offer or every student genuinely wants to inhabit. Facing this reality is far better than perpetuating the comforting lie that cramming both complex reading assignments and rigorous writing production into every single semester-limited course, and then labeling the amalgamation as a singular humanities requirement, is ever going to make true mastery happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By now, virtually anyone connected to the academic world has heard the familiar, increasingly desperate plea from teachers, professors, and writers alike: Please, do not use artificial intelligence to write your papers. For Anne Lovering Rounds, a professor of English at Hostos Community College, part of the City University of New York, this plea has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3269,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[1148,80,5444,1791,856,79,1105,5443,5403,1286,81,5404],"class_list":["post-3270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education-and-career","tag-beyond","tag-career","tag-classrooms","tag-crisis","tag-deep","tag-education","tag-english","tag-essay","tag-exposing","tag-generative","tag-jobs","tag-pedagogical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A Path Forward for Literary Studies<\/h2>\n