In a wonderful coincidence, I’ve had the privilege of reading not one but two books on the value of writing titled “More than words.” Earlier this year, I read John Warner’s More Than Words, an impassioned plea not to grant agency to a non-thinking computer program that merely predicts the next word in sequence (and then the next one) to produce a facsimile of humanlike prose. Warner makes the case that writing is thinking (both the crystallization of it and ‘thinking in progress’), writing is feeling (how it makes our emotional states tangible), and that the value of writing is cheapened by asking students to produce facsimiles of writing (like the five-paragraph essay). When students see writing as a rote exercise, we ought not be surprised when students outsource this labor to freely available resources like ChatGPT.
A serendipitous bookstore find, Mary Ellen MacDonald’s More Than Words emerges from the world of ‘language science.’ MacDonald argues that ‘talking,’ defined broadly as producing language in speech, writing, and/or sign language, has unique impacts on human learning and deserves pride of place in our efforts to learn a new language (or to learn just about anything). This emphasis on ‘talking’ proves to be more impactful than comprehension tests (which only test recognition of ideas and not the ability to recall them from memory). MacDonald sheds light on how language use changes over generations, making the case that these changes are not a matter of better/worse but mostly just different.
Taken together, these two versions of More Than Words make the case that we need to save writing from what Susan Blum calls schoolishness, or “educational practices that emphasize ‘packaged’ learning.” In another piece, an instructor notes that ‘Schoolish’ forms of reading and writing feel like homework because… well, they are just that… homework. The audience is often limited to the instructor, and the feedback students receive may or may not be actionable (depending on your revisions policy). In other words, the writing we ask students to do is often limited to specific academic genres, and it runs the risk of treating writing as something we do in ‘some classes’ and not in others. As Warner points out, it divests writing of meaning/authenticity.
If we take MacDonald’s approach and think about ‘talking’ (speaking, writing, or sign language) more broadly, we can begin to see opportunities to communicate as opportunities for learning. While writing can be formal (term papers, artist statements, and such), writing can be informal. Working with a faculty member on a color theory design assignment, she mentioned that she had students submit a mood board with source images that served as inspiration. A simple integration of writing into a studio class was to ask students to annotate these images: what about them caught their eye? This has the additional benefit of making student thinking visible, a principle that can be applied in so many ways:
- Research in problem solving often uses ‘think alouds’ as a way to have usable data. The participants narrate their thought process as they go, and this can be a useful guide to seeing the structure (or lack thereof) of their problem solving.
- The dictum of ‘you don’t really know something until you teach it to someone else’ takes advantage of the benefits of expression/talking: having to put concepts into their own words and make them clear to another learner is a wonderful opportunity to learn. Taking breaks in your class for students to explain what they’re learning to each other is a tried and true way to encourage their own learning, too.
- Students can generate explanations for what they’re seeing in class: Why do the colors blend in this way? Why does the image appear to have perspective to our eyes? Even when these explanations are incorrect, this commitment to an answer (and subsequent discussion of correct answers) solidifies learning more than just reading or being told: this method even has a name, peer instruction, made famous by Harvard’s Eric Mazur.
The essayist Joan Didion is known for the quote: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking…” Similarly, one of the primary reasons I write this blog is to challenge myself into making sense of the many challenges I observe in teaching, learning, and higher education. While I hope it gives you tangible ideas for your own teaching, I know it has been useful for my own understanding of teaching and learning in the arts.
So, where does this leave us? When students have access to ‘push-button’ solutions like LLMs (ChatGPT and the like), what are we willing to do to preserve the value(s) of writing? If we stick with a genre-based approach to writing, insisting that writing needs to take the shapes of term papers and analyses, this is the work that ChatGPT does best: clearly defined parameters and plenty of examples available on the web. If we take a broader view of writing as an activity that challenges us to put our thoughts into words, we can find ways, both formal and informal, to do the work of thinking on paper, to paraphrase the title of Roland Allen’s history of the notebook, another recent book on the power of writing (which I also recommend 🙂).
P.S. Just in case two books with the same title, More Than Words, has activated a certain song in your memory, I’m here to validate that by sharing a recreation of the original music video from Jack Black and Jimmy Fallon (you’re welcome…):