I love this phrase: “Writing is organized thinking.” It’s a simple sentence that heavy-lifts a deep and normally unthought of truth: thinking can be fleeting if you don’t have a concrete application for it, and writing is one the best tools for such thought containers.
I have searched for its originator, but I think the phrase shares a similar apocryphal origin story to “Kill your darlings”: it’s good advice, circulated around so much that it is attributed to the most sage amongst us, though we dispute who that is.
I think about the phrase a lot. Especially now that computers have firmly dipped into the realm of human thinking and writing. This was bound to happen, and we should embrace the improvements that computers bring to science, health, engineering, etc. And maybe, when it gets good enough, use it to help our writing. Some good writers already do use it. But everyone writes differently. What we should always remember is that we do not just become amazing thinkers without practice. We need tangible playgrounds for our thoughts to mingle with in order to practice logic, structure, creativity, and communication. And that’s why that quote above sticks: Writing makes any subject tangible.
For the English teaching profession this means we are becoming more and more educators of good thinking practices. Seems like a ridiculous and obvious statement, but if you look at the traditional education model, the behind-the-scenes work of thinking is not as prized as much as the product that comes from the thinking.
Outside education land, we worry about taking the practice of thinking for granted through the displacement of human-created content by AI, but the major difference in AI and human writers is that human readers like to empathize with authors. It’s the reason we think legalese is boring. It’s why we yell at cars. No humanness resides on the surface of these things. Sure, we may be tricked into thinking an emotional story is written by a human when it’s really an AI, but we wouldn’t knowingly be so reactive to an AI mimicking human empathy.
We respond in a special way to humans, even if we don’t know the human authors we are reading. Even if the human author is as remote in time and proximity to us as William Shakespeare, we would respond stronger to that than a modern AI author. Same with the human artist who drew an animal on a cave 35,000 years ago. Or even a random 6 year-old’s refrigerator art. If AI wrote all of The Beatles songs, I’m not sure it would have been the same. Would AI sell that many albums, fill that many concert seats? (And what would such a concert be like? The latest ABBA tour?)
Even abstract work by an artist like John Cage gives us some sense of humanity. Many don’t really understand or get into Cage’s avant-garde work. His most famous work, the song “4’33,” is usually performed by a pianist at a piano with a sheet of music. The pianist regards the sheet of music, sets a timer and then sits in silence, not playing, for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The effect is a pause for everyone, to notice that music can be everywhere, even in silence. This could have easily been created by an AI, but since it’s a human’s perspective, it has that punch we humans like, a rogue presence that pushes against our boundaries of perception.
Even Cage’s most software-like authorship behind the album Music of Changes, which was composed entirely through algorithms designed to manipulate sound through chance, has that human touch. Whether you can dig it or not, there is intentionality behind these works of art, even if it’s to showcase randomness. AI would be at least one step removed from that. Even purchasing a urinal and placing it in a museum as art is considered a human statement.
As human teachers of English Language Arts, it is our job to convince students of the value of human thinking. Of the effort that is required to create depth and meaning and interest, organizing it all in a solid foundation like writing, so that a student can practice the curiosity and creativity we have so much potential for in a way that will be preserved for any future reader, whether it’s the author themselves or other people.
And that doesn’t mean that students need to know all the grammar rules or the most effective structure of a genre of writing. It just means that a student needs to learn to have the confidence in themselves to struggle and stick with something, a measured approach, knowing that time and effort will produce a quality piece of writing.
This confidence in our abilities to stick with an idea, whatever happens, to remain open whilst struggling through revision and editing, knowing that just these acts of extended focus will produce something much more thoughtful and creative than what we could have had only in our minds, that’s essential for our students’ growth. Also, not incidentally, it’s what makes good humans.