The rise of AI has caused anxiety about the future of writing instruction. If the technology can write—or help people write—quickly and coherently on nearly any topic, and will likely get better and better at this, do we still need to teach students how to write?
I’m quite certain the answer among educators and school leaders is, overwhelmingly, yes—of course we do. But their rationale, from what I’ve seen, tends to point to cognitive benefits: organizing one’s thoughts, constructing persuasive arguments, faithfully reproducing observations and events on the page, anticipating objections, and the like.
All of that is true. But it’s missing another emerging, less intuitive reason why this instruction is crucial: AI is likely to make good human writing—whether produced independently or with assistance from a large language model (LLM)—rarer and more valuable. But producing authentically human content while using the technology calls for strong traditional writing and editing skills, as well as the ability to apply those skills in chatbot prompts. Schools should therefore teach students to write both with and without AI.
“Well sure,” you might say, “but very few people need to write well in life, regardless whether they use AI, so who cares?” I think that’s wrong for several reasons. There are the obvious cases like students who want to go into careers that require lot of writing—journalists, academics, lawyers, policy wonks like me. Some also want all American students to receive a good liberal arts education, which often entails writing well, being able to spot poor prose, and offering suggestions on how to improve it.
But the value of good human writing is broader than that. Rightly or wrongly, people are beginning to use chatbots for personal tasks, such as composing eulogies and serious messages to loved ones. As these uses become more common—and more available—we’d all be better off if people knew how to shape that content so it reflects genuine human thought and effort and signals that they didn’t merely outsource it entirely to AI and then claim that it represents their own thoughts and feelings. That they did, in fact, spend time writing it, even if they used a chatbot to help them. The skills needed to do that well are the same skills I’m talking about.
Consider what happens when a good writer works with an AI writing tool. They understand what makes a compelling opening, can spot awkward transitions, and have a good eye for sentence and paragraph structure and a good ear for voice. They know writing is stronger when it’s specific, when it draws on experience and concrete examples. So when someone with these skills uses a LLM, they craft prompts that generate better first drafts, and they can see which sections need or would benefit from human refinements—and know how to make them. The result is a sort of symbiotic relationship that produces writing that’s both good and human.
But what about someone who never learned to write effectively? With a simple AI prompt, they can generate passable text instantly, but they have a harder time recognizing when the chatbot has produced overgeneralizations, logical leaps, contradictions, or the kind of bland, repetitive prose that screams chatbot. They also have more trouble knowing what questions to ask or how to guide the AI toward more sophisticated, clearer thinking. And that’s because writing and editing are skills built over time through practice and exposure to good writing. Kids don’t know how to hit a baseball when they pick up a bat for the first time. It takes lots of work. Writing is no different.
This matters because low-quality machine-generated content—“slop,” as it’s called today—is already so widespread and tiresome as to become a sort of background noise unworthy of serious attention or consideration. This applies to virtually everything: images, code, applications, videos, tweets—and longer-form writing, with an explosion of content that’s technically competent but forgettable and lacking humanity. In my role as Fordham editor, I’ve recently been sent essay submissions and policy reports from prominent organizations that do little besides summarize existing information and propose vague, generic, almost meaningless recommendations—complete with LLMs’ tell-tale style. There is also, apparently, a deluge of academic papers that sound rigorous and correct but are actually based on fake, AI-generated data.
In this environment, content that’s recognizably human—that bears the unmistakable marks of individual thinking, personal experience, and authentic voice—will become increasingly valuable. Some readers can already distinguish between writing that emerges from genuine human engagement with ideas and writing that’s been assembled by a machine, and people’s eye for this will likely improve as their patience for it decreases. I believe people will come to gravitate toward and appreciate content that feels truly authored. Part of this will, I hope, be because such content is better. But probably more important is that such a human touch will signal that whoever made it cared enough to spend time on it—that it wasn’t lazily produced and passed off as their own.
If I’m right, schools should double-down on writing instruction. Recognize that writing has all the aforementioned cognitive benefits, but understand what else we’re preparing students for—and explain that to them. Organizing one’s thoughts and communicating clearly are important goals, but so is teaching them how to be effective partners with AI so they can create content that is distinctly human in an increasingly slop-filled world. This means learning to write independently while also learning to use AI productively—as a drafting assistant rather than a substitute for thinking.
Notably, this means students will need to develop sophisticated editorial judgment, in addition to basic writing competency. They should learn how to spot strong arguments, evaluate evidence, and understand how style and tone shape a reader’s experience. They have to know when AI-generated content serves their purposes and when it needs significant human intervention. And most crucially, they must develop their own authentic voice—the kind of distinctive thinking and expression that can’t be replicated by LLMs. One way to do this could be the use of “mentor texts” in writing instruction. Classes study effective human writing—a good op-ed from a prestigious publication or a chapter from an acclaimed novel—and then imitate its specific structures and styles in their own drafts.
The students who master these skills will be better equipped to thrive in an AI-dominated world. They’ll use AI tools to amplify their capabilities, to be extensions of themselves, while ensuring their written words remain human—and therefore worthy of people’s attention and appreciation. Meanwhile, students who never develop strong writing and editing abilities will have less professional options and be less able to create content that is compelling, valuable, or their own. The stakes are, I believe, larger than people think.
