Everyone seems to have their “ChatGPT moment.”
As in, you almost remember where you were and what you were doing when Silicon Valley dropped this dazzling new technology into our laps in late 2022. The response was quick, the revolution swift, the discourse white hot. ChatGPT, a large language model AI system that could write a decent freshman composition paper, promised to upend and rehash our notions of language and communication. Like the printing press, the radio, the television, and the iPhone before it, AI would be here to stay. Adapt or perish.
Of course, today we know a lot more about AI’s fundamental limitations and faults. It makes stuff up. It can’t account for context. Perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t know what the heck it’s saying since it isn’t a center of consciousness. Since 2022, I’ve been highlighting AI’s mishaps and shortcomings in dozens of essays and blogs, all the while seeking to develop a philosophy for the practice that AI proposes to replace: Writing.
I started teaching freshman composition in Fall of 2024. A new instructor, with writing experience but none with teaching, I quickly realized that while I had long loved the practice of putting words on a page, I hadn’t fully explored why such an activity might be valuable for the student athlete with plans to become a physical therapist, or the math major with an aversion to sentences. Not only would I need to convince students that composition was important, but I also had to plead with them to reject using AI to write their papers. “You’ll get nothing out of this if you opt for AI,” I told them. “It’s like asking a tall guy to lift you up to dunk a basketball and then giving yourself credit for a windmill. Absurd!”
For the student who already thinks an introductory writing class is a waste of time, ChatGPT never looked so good. It’s a class they have to take and get out of the way, and much of the time, instructors are shoddy expositors of the craft. Many of us don’t do a good job teaching the discipline. We are mumbling adjuncts or inadept teaching assistants. (I’ve been both.) So, just assigning them four papers and then bidding them adieu would definitely be easy, but it wouldn’t be satisfying. Why? Because even if students don’t know it, learning how to write is a tool for learning how to think, and not only to think, but to grow into a mature and well-balanced human being.
That prior sentence shows the liberal arts advocate in me. As a student at Wheaton College, an evangelical liberal arts school outside of Chicago, we were told often about how education is not just a transfer of information. It’s about forming the whole person, emphasis on “whole.” We go to school to understand what it means to be a human being and to orient ourselves toward the good life. That doesn’t discount students who go into more practical fields like engineering, business, or chemistry, but all those fields can be seen as avenues of knowing truth, which at Wheaton, was no different than knowing God, or an aspect of God’s character.
But how does one get there? How do you lean into positive formation and learn what it means to live a truly rich and deeply good kind of life?
I learned a big part of the answer during my time at Wheaton and have been trying to tease out the implications and complexities ever since. We become who we are based on what, or who, we give our attention to.
The French writer Simone Weil once wrote that,
If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul.
Weil uses geometry as an example of giving one’s attention over to something external to the self, but the principle applies to writing, too. Writing requires deep attention if it’s going to be worth reading. And for Weil, this activity doesn’t just lead to “good marks.” That kind of concern should be tertiary or even go dismissed. This kind of attention can turn into something more—something that morphs into not just attention but loving attention.
Naturally, then, reading is a central part of writing well. To write anything of value, you have to read the works of others. Reading well requires humility. Reading entails admitting that there’s a lot to gain from engaging with the work of others. Only after I’ve leafed through a bit of the literary canon can I feel confident in commenting on its value. If you spend any time among eager undergrad students in a creative writing class, you might find that a lot of them really want to be great writers and yet few of them aspire to become excellent readers. Attention is at the center of both practices. You must give your attention to a text in order to draw from it and then give your attention to a blank page in order to create a work of value. Reading well leads to writing well.
Giving attention, whether in reading or writing, doesn’t just make for more “critical thinkers.” If Weil is correct, it makes for more virtuous people. It’s no secret that our culture is primed with a penchant for self-indulgence, with mindless entertainment kicking older forms of leisure to the curb. People still read, sure, but the appetite for interesting, vital writing is waning. Novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace gave a 2003 interview in which he said many of his friends shied away from reading books because “there’s a kind of dread” involved in it. We can’t tolerate silence or the thought of being alone with ourselves.
Writing helps you attend more deeply to the world outside your own head, so yes, everyone would do well to make a habit of putting words on a page from time to time. Ultimately, though, we would all do well to practice honing our skills of attention in whatever method possible, especially in society where the tech giants are fighting for our attentional currency every moment of our lives. Simply looking around is a good place to start. Noticing. Seeing. Philosopher Bradford S. Hadaway, commenting on Weil’s essay, writes,
Other attention-cultivating practices may lack the academic feel of those described above. Practicing music, creating art, playing chess, pausing in worship to reflect quietly on a text or image—all of these have a truth-orientation and a built-in demand to wait patiently on those truths to emerge. And let us not forget those long, quiet walks, where the “text” is the beautiful created order. If we are attentive and “open the envelope” of our souls as we walk, the insight we receive is as forceful as through the written word.
One of the best ways to stay sane and enrich our souls is to learn how to write. At least, that’s what I’m telling my students. Most of them may not heed the advice and opt for ChatGPT, moving into jobs where AI does half of their workload anyway. Hopefully, though, a few will truly try their hand at a boring composition essay, get lost in the words, stumbling over flashes of real insight, and shake themselves out of the wonder only to find themselves hungry for more. Once you experience that kind of semi-prayerful state of mind, it’s hard to go back to TikTok scrolling.