Chenea Bond has an excellent rationale for banning the use of AI in her classes. 

Writing is two things above all: it is a craft, and it is a personal communication. (I suppose some technical writing might be excepted from this.) Writing that claims to be from me to you but is actually from me and my Bot—or even just my Bot—to you is inauthentic and sometimes even deceitful. It involves a person in the reader, but the personhood conveyed through the writing is compromised. This writing involves impersonation as much or more as it involves a real person in the human author. And insofar as writing is a craft, if I were in a Medieval-style guild for writers, I can’t imagine letting an apprentice pose as a master or even a journeyman simply because he had found a way to impersonate one, to produce something that poses as masterful work.

"Is It Okay to Use Grammarly?" by Dixie Dillon Lane

 As teacher of writing, I've already come across multiple situations where a student has used AI to help create an assignment. As I read students' essays and other writing assignments, there are times when there's just a certain sixth sense that says, "This is not human writing." It's very subtle, but the sense of non-humanness is definitely there. 

I found this article on the topic by Miriam Bowers-Abbott and Wyatt Abbott illuminating. Here's an excerpt:

 Connectives are a large group of terms inclusive of conjunctions (such as and), prepositions (such as before), and adverbs (such as however). There is a precedent for using such terms as a means to distinguish the backgrounds of language users, often as a means to differentiate between native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) of a language. In a comparison of student English essays by NS and NNS of French origin, Granger and Tyson (1996) found that NNS were far less likely to use a term such as “instead” in their writing. At the same time, the researchers found that NNS used a term such as “indeed” at nearly four times the frequency of NS. Ma and Wang (2016) compared essays written in English by British and American students to essays written in English by Cantonese students. In the study, researchers noted many similarities in connective usage, but also noted that NS used the term “because” with higher frequency. Kuswoyo et al. (2020) compared language usage in NS and NNS of English among engineering lecturers. The researchers found that the NNS tended to use “and” and “so” more frequently than NS in lectures.  

 

I have a new post (with poem!) on Humane Pursuits today: "Fatherhood, Priorities, and the Habit of Writing."

My essay "The Poet Who Writes with at Least Three Body Parts" is up today on Humane Pursuits.

One of my favorite books on writing is William Zinsser's On Writing Well. In Chapter 10, "Bits and Pieces," he gives a lot of good advice on various aspects of writing. Here are some of my favorite bits and pieces:

On verbs: 

Use active verbs unless there is no comfortable way to get around using a passive verb. The difference between an active verb style and a passive-verb style—in clarity and vigor—is the difference between life and death for a writer. "Joe saw him" is strong. "He was seen by Joe" is weak. The first is short and precise; it leaves no doubt about who did what. The second is necessarily longer and it has an insipid quality: something was done by somebody to someone else. It's also ambiguous. How often was he seen by Joe? Once? Every day? Once a week? A style that consists of passive constructions will sap the reader's energy. Nobody ever quite knows what is being perpetrated by whom and on whom.

On little qualifiers: 

Prune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw: "a bit," "a little," "sort of," "kind of," "rather," "quite," "very," "too," "pretty much," "in a sense" and dozens more. They dilute your style and your persuasiveness.  

Don't say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be confused. Be tired. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.  

On the exclamation point: 

Don't use it unless you must to achieve a certain effect. It has a gushy aura, the breathless excitement of a debutante commenting on an event that was exciting only to her: "Daddy says I must have had too much champagne!" "But honestly, I could have danced all night!" We have all suffered more than our share of these sentences in which an exclamation point knocks us over the head with how cute or wonderful something was. Instead, construct your sentence so that the order of the words will put the emphasis where you want it.

On transitions: 

Learn to alert the reader as soon as possible to any change in mood from the previous sentence. At least a dozen words will do this job for you: "but," "yet," "however," "nevertheless," "still," "instead," "thus," "therefore," "meanwhile," "now," "later," "today," "subsequently" and several more. I can't overstate how much easier it is for readers to process a sentence if you start with "but" when you're shifting direction. Or, conversely, how much harder it is if they must wait until the end to realize that you have shifted.  

Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with "but." If that's what you learned, unlearn it—there's no stronger word at the start. It announces total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change.

On concept nouns: 

Nouns that express a concept are commonly used in bad writing instead of verbs that tell what somebody did. Here are three typical dead sentences:  

      The common reaction is incredulous laughter.  

      Bemused cynicism isn't the only response to the old system.

     The current campus hostility is a symptom of the change.

What is so eerie about these sentences is that they have no people in them. They also have no working verbs—only "is" or "isn't." The reader can't visualize anybody performing some activity; all the meaning lies in impersonal nouns that embody a vague concept: "reaction," "cynicism," "response," "hostility." Turn these cold sentences around. Get people doing things:  

     Most people just laugh with disbelief.

     Some people respond to the old system by turning cynical; others say. . .

     It's easy to notice the change—you can see how angry all the students are.  

My revised sentences aren't jumping with vigor, partly because the material I'm trying to knead into shape is shapeless dough. But at least they have real people and real verbs. Don't get caught holding a bag full of abstract nouns. You'll sink to the bottom of the lake and never be seen again.

On "The Quickest Fix": 

Surprisingly often a difficult problem in a sentence can be solved by simply getting rid of it. Unfortunately, this solution is usually the last one that occurs to writers in a jam. First they will put the troublesome phrase through all kinds of exertions— moving it to some other part of the sentence, trying to rephrase it, adding new words to clarify the thought or to oil whatever is stuck. These efforts only make the situation worse, and the writer is left to conclude that there is no solution to the problem—not a comforting thought. When you find yourself at such an impasse, look at the troublesome element and ask, "Do I need it at all?" Probably you don't. It was trying to do an unnecessary job all along—that's why it was giving you so much grief. Remove it and watch the afflicted sentence spring to life and breathe normally. It's the quickest cure and very often the best.

On rewriting:

This is probably his best advice in the entire chapter. I posted some of Zinsser's thoughts from this section here.

At first glance, writing may seem not nearly so much an art of the body as, say, dancing or gardening or carpentry. And yet language is the most intimately physical of all the artistic means. We have it palpably in our mouths; it is our langue, our tongue. Writing it, we shape it with our hands. Reading aloud what we have written--as we must do, if we are writing carefully--our language passees in at the eyes, out at the mouth, in at the ears; the words are immersed and steeped in the senses of the body before they make sense in the mind.

Wendell Berry, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine," What Are People For?

I have often counseled people who tell me that they don't see anything when they read the Bible, "Go home and this time, write the text, instead of just reading it. If anything stands out as helpful, make a mark and write down your ideas about it. Keep writing till you are done with that insight. Then keep reading and writing the text till you see something else to write about, or until you are out of time."

The main value in this is that writing forces us to slow down and see what we are reading. Some of us have very bad habits of passive reading that certain types of formal education have bred into us, by forcing us to read quickly when we ought to be reading slowly--thinking as we go. Writing is a way of slowing us down and opening our eyes to see what we do not otherwise see.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, p. 124

There is no reason why fixed dogma should fix anything that the writer sees in the world. On the contrary, dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality. Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery. The fiction writer is an observer, first, last, and always, but he cannot be an adequate observer unless he is free from uncertainty about what he sees. Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute. The [Christian] fiction writer is entirely free to observe. He feels perfectly free to look at the one we already have and to show exactly what he sees. He feels no need to apologize for the ways of God to man or to avoid looking at the ways of man to God. For him, to "tidy up reality" is certainly to succumb to the sin of pride. Open and free observation is founded on our ultimate faith that the universe is meaningful, as the Church teaches.

Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 178

I'm currently working my way through Flannery O'Connor's essay collection Mystery and Manners. O'Connor can be a bit snooty, and she gets on my nerves sometimes. I'm also not a fan of her Roman Catholicism. But wow. What a collection of insights.

O'Connor is a model writer for Christians in that she rejects sentimentality, abstraction, and preachiness in favor of writing stories that are concrete and true to reality, and that show rather than tell. In this collection of essays, she warns against so many of the mistakes that I see young writers make.

I've just finished her essay "The Church and the Fiction Writer," and I think there are so many insights that we can gain from it. Here are some of my favorite statements in this essay:

On writing fiction as a means to some other end:

"It is generally supposed, and not least by Catholics, that the Catholic who writes fiction is out to use fiction to prove the truth of the Faith, or at the least, to prove the existence of the supernatural. He may be. No one certainly can be sure of his low motives except as they suggest themselves in his finished work, but when the finished work suggests that pertinent actions have been fraudulently manipulated or overlooked or smothered, whatever purposes the writer started out with have already been defeated. What the fiction writer will discover, if he discovers anything at all, is that he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of abstract truth. The writer learns ... to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them."

On Catholic readers' compartmentalization of nature and grace: 

"If the average Catholic reader could be tracked down through the swamps of letters-to-the-editor and other places where he momentarily reveals himself, he would be found to be more of a Manichean than the Church permits. By separating nature and grace as much as possible, he has reduced his conception of the supernatural to pious cliché and has become able to recognize nature in literature in only two forms, the sentimental and the obscene. He would seem to prefer the former, while being more of an authority on the latter, but the similarity between the two generally escapes him. He forgets that sentimentality is an excess, a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence, and that innocence, whenever it is overemphasized in the ordinary human condition, tends by some natural law to become its opposite. We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our return to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite."  

"If we intend to encourage Catholic fiction writers, we must convince those coming along that the Church does not restrict their freedom to be artists but insures it . . . and to convince them of this requires, perhaps more than anything else, a body of Catholic readers who are equipped to recognize something in fiction besides passages they consider obscene. It is popular to suppose that anyone who can read the telephone book can read a short story or a novel, and it is more than usual to find the attitude among Catholics that since we possess the truth . . . we can use this truth directly as an instrument of judgment on any discipline at any time without regard for the nature of that discipline itself. Catholic readers are constantly being offended and scandalized by novels that they don't have the fundamental equipment to read in the first place, and often these are works that are permeated with a Christian spirit."

"It is when the individual's faith is weak, not when it is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life; and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the supernatural is apt to be gradually lost. Fiction, made according to its own laws, is an antidote to such a tendency, for it renews our knowledge that we live in the mystery from which we draw our abstractions. The Catholic fiction writer, as fiction writer, will look for the will of God first in the laws and limitations of his art and will hope that if he obeys these, other blessings will be added to his work."

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully.

Flannery O'Connor, "Writing Short Stories"

Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.

Now this is something that can't be learned only in the head; it has to be learned in the habits. It has to become a way that you habitually look at things. The fiction writer has to realize that he can't create compassion with compassion, or emotion with emotion, or thought with thought. He has to provide all these things with a body; he has to create a world with weights and extension.

Flannery O'Connor, "Writing Short Stories"

Most people who think they want to write stories ... want to write about problems, not people; or about abstract issues, not concrete situations. They have an idea, or a feeling, or an overflowing ego, or they want to Be A Writer, or they want to give their wisdom to the world in a simple-enough way for the world to be able to absorb it. In any case, they don't have a story and they wouldn't be willing to write it if they did; and in the absence of a story, they set out to find a theory or a formula or a technique.

 Now none of this is to stay that when you write a story, you are supposed to forget or give up any moral position that you hold. Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

 Flannery O'Connor, "Writing Short Stories"

My chief concern was now to see myself in print. It was as if I could not be quite satisfied that I was real until I could feed my ambition with these trivial glories, and my ancient selfishness was now matured and concentrated in this desire to see myself externalized in a public and printed and official self which I could admire at my ease. This was what I really believed in: reputation, success. I wanted to live in the eyes and the mouths and the minds of men. I was no so crude that I wanted to be known and admired by the whole world: there was a certain naive satisfaction in the idea of being only appreciated by a particular minority, which gave a special fascination to this urge within me. But when my mind was absorbed in all that, ... how could I love God, when everything I did was done not for Him but for myself, and not trusting in His aid, but relying on my own wisdom and talents?

Lax rebuked me for all this. His whole attitude about writing was purified of such stupidity, and was steeped in holiness, in charity, in disinterestedness.  

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain, 236

"Inspiration usually comes during work rather than before it."

Madeleine L'Engle

Writing a book, full time, takes between two and ten years. The long poem, John Berryman said, takes between five and ten years. Thomas Mann was a prodigy of production. Working full time, he wrote a page a day. That is 365 pages a year, for he did write every day--a good-sized book a year. At a page a day, he was one of the most prolific writers who ever lived. Flaubert wrote steadily, with only the usual, appalling strains. For twenty-five years he finished a big book every five to seven years. My guess is that full-time writers average a book every five years: seventy-three usable pages a year, or a usable fifth of a page a day. The years that biographers and other nonfiction writers spend amassing and mastering materials are well matched by the years novelists and short-story writers spend fabricating solid worlds that answer to immaterial truths. On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, p. 14

Just discovered Billy Collins's "Advice to Writers." Lovely poem. An excerpt:

When you find your way back home
. . .
you will behold in the light of dawn
the immaculate altar of your desk,
a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.
From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift
a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,
and cover pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of devoted ants
that followed you in from the woods.

From Sailing Alone Around the Room

From Chadwick's introduction to Augustine's Confessions:

At the end of his life Augustine wrote a review and reappraisal of his output, the Retractationes. . . . When he came to the Confessions he observes that they serve to excite the human mind and affection towards God; the act of writing the book had done that for himself at the time, and "that is the effect when it is read now." 

Shared this with my students this week.

Why do I have to study literature / composition? Why do I have to write a literary analysis paper? I don't see the point.

Here are some answers, with help from Arthur Holmes's The Idea of a Christian College:

Reason 1: You are not merely a worker, a professional, or even a scholar. You are a human being created in God’s image. The Christian study of the liberal arts explores what it means to be a human being created in God’s image.

“The liberal arts [literature, history, etc.] are those which are appropriate to persons as persons, rather than to the specific function of a worker or a professional or even a scholar. A person may be all of these things, but she is more basically a person. It was Cicero who defined the liberal arts as those which are appropriate to humanity. If one is to be anything more than a specialist or technician, if one is to feel life whole and to live it whole rather than piecemeal, if one is to think for himself rather than live secondhand, the liberal arts are needed to educate the person. There is no difficulty in transferring this clue concerning liberal education to a Christian conception of persons created in the image of God. We are to image God in all of our creaturely activities, our cultural existence and every phase of our humanity. To image God in the fullness of our humanity is our highest calling.”

Reason 2: Usefulness isn’t the point. Literature (and the other liberal arts) may be useful in some ways, but their “usefulness” is not the point. They are intended to help us think about things like beauty, goodness, truth, and what it means to be human—things that have value in themselves, regardless of their usefulness.

"In his classic nineteenth-century work, The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman distinguishes between liberal and useful arts. It is not a complete disjunction, for the liberal arts are also useful, and the useful arts are often based on liberal arts and sciences. But the point is that some arts are more liberal than others, and some are more useful for economic and other particular purposes than they are of value to us in themselves. The distinction is worth preserving. It is the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental value. Some things have little but instrumental value; for example, a shining new coin with the head of George Washington on one side and the American eagle on the other has instrumental worth: it is good for what you can buy with it but little else. If you tell me it is of intrinsic worth and you value it for itself, I call you a miser. Other things have far more intrinsic worth as well as some instrumental value. Understanding is valued for itself. Beauty and goodness are of value in themselves. . . . Liberal learning concerns itself with truth and beauty and goodness, which have intrinsic worth to people considered as persons rather than as workers or in whatever function alone.

“We may distinguish along these lines between literature as one of the liberal arts and journalism, in which the use of what is written predominates; between the natural sciences as a quest to understand nature, which is liberal learning, and the technology that does something with it; between political science on the one hand as the attempt to understand political institutions and processes, and propaganda techniques on the other; between the science of psychology and the useful art of counseling; between theology and the work of evangelism; between philosophy as a liberal art and apologetics as one use it might have. Usefulness is no crime. But the practical uses of things we learn are limited and changeable, while the effect of learning on the person is less limited because it lasts. Liberal learning therefore takes the long-range view and concentrates on what shapes a person’s understanding and values rather than on what he can use in one or two of the changing roles he might later play.”

Reason 3: Education is not really about usefulness, but about the kind of person you are becoming. What kind of person are you turning into? A person who thinks only about a job, only about “usefulness”? Or a person who understands what it means to have godly character and to love things of intrinsic worth, like beauty, goodness, and truth?

“The question to ask about education is not ‘What can I do with it?’ That is the wrong question because it concentrates on instrumental values and reduces everything to a useful art. The right question is rather ‘What can it do to me?’” To the Christian in the Christian college, then, the development of an inquiring mind becomes an expression of faith and hope and love addressed to God. It is part of our response to God’s self-revelation."

 Reason 4: The difficult work of carefully dissecting a text and writing an articulate analysis paper based on that text develops your intellect and your ability to reflect—and both a well-developed intellect and the ability to reflect have value in themselves, regardless of their usefulness.

"Intellectual development requires that we read and write. Reading is of course prerequisite to informed conversation, an art that is often sadly underdeveloped today. Writing is prerequisite to exactness of thought and expression. Together [reading and writing force students] to think and then to reshape their thoughts in more and more consistent and cogent and lucid ways. To read is to gain input, to fertilize imagination, to conceptualize, to follow an argument, to evaluate. To write is to become articulate, to express what I feel and explain why I feel as I do, to expound, to argue, to offer good reasons, to explore relationships, to have a sense of the whole, to see things in total context. [For a student] to [learn to read and write well] is to think for himself, to develop more fully the possession of his God-given powers. He becomes . . . a reflective, thinking being."

Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost. That idea is hard to accept. We all have an emotional equity in our first draft; we can’t believe that it wasn’t born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn’t. Most writers don’t initially say what they want to say, or say it as well as they could. The newly hatched sentence almost always has something wrong with it. It’s not clear. It’s not logical. It’s verbose. It’s klunky. It’s pretentious. It’s boring. It’s full of clutter. It’s full of clichés. It lacks rhythm. It can be read in several different ways. It doesn’t lead out of the previous sentence. It doesn’t . . . The point is that clear writing is the result of a lot of tinkering.

Many people assume that professional writers don’t need to rewrite; the words just fall into place. On the contrary, careful writers can’t stop fiddling. I’ve never thought of rewriting as an unfair burden; I’m grateful for every chance to keep improving my work. Writing is like a good watch—it should run smoothly and have no extra parts. Students don’t share my love of rewriting. They think of it as a punishment: extra homework or extra infield practice. Please—if you’re such a student—think of it as a gift. You won’t write well until you understand that writing is an evolving process, not a finished product. Nobody expects you to get it right the first time, or even the second time.

Most rewriting consists of reshaping and tightening and refining the raw material you wrote on your first try. Much of it consists of making sure you’ve given the reader a narrative flow he can follow with no trouble from beginning to end. Keep putting yourself in the reader’s place. Is there something he should have been told early in the sentence that you put near the end? Does he know when he starts sentence B that you’ve made a shift—of subject, tense, tone, emphasis—from sentence A?

Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don’t like to write . . . but I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence. . . . With every small refinement I feel that I’m coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that won the game.

William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction