Writing an essay is a pain. I get it.
I’ve written a few essays this semester and I’ll have to write a few more before it’s over. They loom over your head for weeks, they’re time consuming, and critically, writing an essay isn’t an efficient thing to do. It takes hours, and half the time you end up dropping some of the research you already spent hours to find. It’s always hard to start, too. I’ll think about starting an essay for days or weeks before actually sitting down to research or write.
So why won’t I use ChatGPT to write it for me, or at least brainstorm? Everyone else is.
This question seems to be at the crux of academic conversations everywhere. Everyone has an opinion, and there’s a lot of ground to cover. Moral reasons, arguments about the future, efficiency in the workplace, declining literacy rates…I can’t cover the entire debate here. Instead, I want to talk about a position I don’t see a lot of. A love letter to writing, if you will.
Writing is inherently exploratory. The writing process itself is where the magic happens: without it, we lose out on one of the best ways to learn about ourselves and the world.
Since I was just complaining about writing, this might seem a little jarring. I would argue that it’s not: in fact, the friction is part of the reason writing is so valuable.
Let me explain. Writing is annoying, right? You stare at a blank page for ages, you write a sentence and delete it, you shuffle around an outline, and you can’t find the word you’re looking for. That’s friction. It’s part of what makes writing hard: it feels like it’s fighting you. In the process, though, you figure out what you think is worth putting on the page. You write a better sentence, one that feels more right to you. Your outline is more coherent. You either find the word, one you probably haven’t used in a while that’s been collecting dust in your vocabulary, or you find a better one. You might even google the meaning of the word in hopes of finding it, and find a new word in the process.
Every piece of friction requires thought. It’s annoying, especially because nowadays we use social media constantly, which thrives on eliminating friction. Everything is a click away. If you don’t know how to feel about something, 20 people are explaining their hot takes one after another, just a scroll apart. There’s no friction: no pause, no research, no thought. Just input.
ChatGPT is the same way. You plug in a prompt, you get a response. Paste it, maybe change a couple words, and boom. Submit the assignment and be done with it. Zero friction. It’s easy, sure, but that’s because you didn’t really have to think in order to do it.
This is my love letter to writing, yes, but beyond that, it’s my love letter to thinking.
When you’re writing, you get to meet yourself. Just about everything you’re writing comes directly from you, parring quotations (which you went out and found). Writing something like an article is intimate – you find yourself as you write. Journalling is an even more intimate way of writing. An essay might seem less personal, but it’s not just you that you get to meet when you write. It’s the world.
When I was a kid, I had so much more wonder than I do now. I wanted to know how things worked, see as many animals as I could, and learning and reading and writing felt like gifts. Nowadays, I’m exhausted. I learn things in my classes and I want to go to bed. Writing brings some of the wonder back.
The world is interesting. Sometimes you forget until you have to go find it. Even essays about certain people’s perspectives, or a niche scientific topic – people make these things, or they figure them out, and through writing you get to learn about them. In persuasive essays, you contribute to the conversation directly. In almost all essays, there’s some kind of research or searching involved. You get to go digging and find something, and there’s almost always something you didn’t know or a witty way something was written. We excavate and we explore in the sandbox of life.
And it doesn’t just affect you. My roommate is in a history class that makes her write essays, so she’ll tell me about them and we’ll talk. Have you ever had an hour long discussion about hygiene culture and racial discrimination in the early 1900s? It’s interesting. It’s so much better than gossiping about other people’s drama (although that’s fun too).
My memory about the topics I’ve written essays on is better too. My memory isn’t always the best, but when I’ve taken the time to write an essay on something, it sticks, even years later. Maybe not perfectly, but better than a random lecture. And yeah, it was a pain to write, but it’s still here.
When you use ChatGPT, even for brainstorming, you lose out on that. You lose out on finding out what’s interesting to you, you lose out on finding fun facts or academic spats while you’re researching, and you lose out on meeting yourself and the world while you write. You shrink your capacity for patience and thought when you never encounter friction. You don’t get to meet the parts of yourself that still wonder about things.
There’s a lot of reasons I don’t use ChatGPT, but one of the big ones is that I want to write. It’s an argument for writing, rather than one against AI. I want to meet myself again and again in an empty Word document or a college ruled notebook. I want to meet the world, too.
It’s worth the friction.