How I Write Today

I've been thinking about the writing and learning shortcuts made possible by AI: which ones are good, and which ones reveal something important about the future of education. This is a moment to be reflective about how things have changed, starting with me. Hence the note above.

For at least the past year, I have used Claude almost every day, almost always as an editor. Not for text or email, not for LinkedIn posts, but for essays or other communications that warrant a second or third version.

For essays, I start with an outline, or a messy typed draft, or (my current favorite) I speak my ideas aloud into a Google doc. Voice is key, and I mean that in two ways. Literally, I often dictate my first draft, but “voice” also signals the narrative style to which I aspire: open-minded, analytical, thoughtful, conversational, occasionally provocative, sometimes earnest, sometimes snarky, but never mean and never dogmatic. (I did say aspire.) Then I collaborate with Claude to shorten, sharpen, and stress-test. Have I built a strong and logical case? What's another word for "transform"? (Claude, to its credit, has never once pointed out that I have written some version of "AI will transform higher education" at least a hundred times. Claude is always patient and kind, so much so that I have tried to get it to be just a little less fawning.)

Claude may seem to be no more than a shortcut. I like shortcuts that get me where I'm going faster. It has certainly earned a place in my personal pantheon of technology shortcuts, alongside speed dial, GPS, and the Cuisinart. But I'm after more than speed. I believe I write better with Claude. That part surprised me.

AI tools have forced me to reexamine the writing and revision process. I was already a fairly confident writer and editor before Claude. It is hard for me to capture when and how I first learned to write, other than to be absolutely sure it was not in my doctoral program in English literature, where I eagerly embraced Lacan and French structuralism, and luxuriated in prose so turgid, so clotted with jargon, so swaddled in sentences that would have made Henry James blush.

My rehabilitation began during my one year as Assistant Director of English Programs at the Modern Language Association, where I worked with some of the finest editors in the world. I watched as they pored over academic essays and rendered them at least slightly more readable, and I learned. The estimable Clare Cook and her team were my mentors and guides through the land of emendations. To this day, nothing induces flow in me like editing.

Improving my own writing came later. My new style emerged under the pressures of the business world, which required a different sense of accountability and a not-too-subtle demand to get to the point. What exactly do you mean? Unpack that sentence! The shorter the better! It took me years to get the opacity of academic writing out of my system.

So AI tools arrived after I had banked decades of judgment, enough to know when Claude's suggestion is an improvement and when it is a flattening. I can edit the editor. That capacity was built slowly, inefficiently, and often painfully, through years of bad drafts, ruthless teachers and human writing partners, and the humbling discovery that clarity is harder than complexity.
Once upon a time, even online publications had human editors who suggested smart copy edits. Nowadays, my post-Claude readers are almost always my husband (neurologist by day, great reader by night) and my best friend, another great reader but also an experienced editor, who either waves me away with a quick approval or digs in and points out where my words and ideas are falling short.

After they weigh in, the last and final version is mine. (Last and final? Claude would have flagged that redundancy. I'm keeping it.)

Does that all sound right? Maybe not. 

The anxiety emerges when I think about my grandchildren, still early in their schooling. I feel something close to vertigo. While I adopt these shortcuts after a lifetime of going the long way around, for them AI is there from the start. Should it be? Should they know what it feels like to wrestle a sentence into submission? Will they develop the judgment to recognize when the machine has made something worse? Or will they simply accept the first fluent answer, never missing what they didn't build or striving for originality?

When is friction essential to growth? With all due respect for memorization, map reading, and knife skills, I have no regrets about speed dial, GPS, or the Cuisinart. There is loss, to be sure, but when is it meaningful loss? How will we know?

That is the question that educators must answer. I have no patience for policies that call for teachers to retreat into blue books, to dodge the hard work of figuring out how writing and learning will now be taught, or to indulge false nostalgia for some lost golden age of education. 
The next generation deserves teachers wise enough to tell essential friction from mere inconvenience, and bold enough to build a curriculum on the difference.

I do know that I feel lucky to have learned to write the hard way before the easy way existed. My grandchildren won't have that luck. What they'll have instead is up to us.