The value of writing

By Trevor Getz, OER Project Team

It’s inevitable: The world changes. One generation follows another, each with its own technologies and modes of communication. Right now, many of us are thinking about artificial intelligence (AI), and the transformations it’s bringing. As history teachers, we’re especially concerned with the way AI seems to be infiltrating our students’ writing processes, affecting their roles as editors or co-authors (or even, illicitly, authors).

Before we dismiss AI as an impediment to learning to write, let’s remember that even writing itself had its critics when it appeared on the scene. Not in its first incarnation, when it was merely a means of keeping financial accounts or providing receipts for merchants. But later, when it became a means to tell stories. Did you know that Plato and Socrates were both suspicious of writing? Plato even records a conversation in which Socrates told Phaedrus that writing was inferior to oral discourse. He had this to say about written words: “You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever.”

Still, over time, humans have come to love writing. How many of us have felt like Stephen King, for example: “I’ve written because it fulfills me,” King writes, “I did it for the buzz.” Writing is a way to let out what’s living inside us; to communicate our stories to others; to create things that never existed and relive things that really happened. And it can be done with almost no materials at all. A laptop might be useful, sure. But all you really need is a pen or pencil and paper. There’s a purity to writing that’s hard to replicate with other media because so little stands between the writer and their ultimate product.

Writing isn’t just about letting it all out. It’s also about control. The writing process takes thoughts in the brain and translates them to movements of the hand, which then become words on the page. That process can be like taming a wild animal, and then putting it to work for you. Joan Didion, one of America’s greatest writers, tells us that writing is a way of thinking through a problem. That’s why it’s so important to write clearly. “Simplicity is the key to communication,” James Baldwin once told a reporter from The Paris Review. “You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.” If only!

There’s a certain power to good writing. Writing has become central to the human experience because it allows professionals like Didion and Baldwin—and even amateurs like our students—to express their individual experiences and at the same time hold a mirror up to their social settings. Like Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz, I see writing as a way to capture the complexities of a society as well as an individual. Thus Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s books are not just an account of colonialism, but also a tool aimed at fighting against it. And Lu Xun’s essays could be the inspiration for the birth of a modern Chinese nation. And Mary Shelley could capture the lightning of the Enlightenment, mix it with a heavy dose of incipient Feminism, and douse it with the anxieties of the Industrial Revolution, while incidentally founding a new genre in the process—science fiction. Only with writing.

Let’s face it, AI is already changing the way writing happens in our classrooms. We can’t stop it. But we can find ways to both harness and grow comfortable with AI. First, let’s acknowledge that we’re learning right alongside our students—most of us aren’t AI experts. Then, let’s lean into what we do best—creating meaningful opportunities for students to grow. Let’s see what we can create.

About the author: Trevor Getz is Professor of African History at San Francisco State University. He has written eleven books on African and world history, including Abina and the Important Men. He is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.

Cover image: Compilation of images:

• The Seated Scribe, 2613–2494 BC; painted limestone and inlaid quartz. By The Louvre, CC BY-SA 3.0.
• A 14th century illustration of Titivillus, a demon said to introduce errors into the work of scribes, besets a scribe at his desk, public domain.
• Young Woman with Youth and Young Attendant, 18th-century woodblock print by Isoda Koryūsai. Public domain.
• An illustration, signed "F. Beard," accompanies the preface of "Chalk Lessons, or the Black-board in the Sunday School. A Practical Guide for Superintendents and Teachers" by Frank Beard (1896). Public domain.
• Men and printing press, Brattleboro, Vt, from Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views. Public domain.
• Student in Computer Room at London School of Economics, 1981.No restrictions.