An essay (or any other writing) is about formalizing your thought around a topic. It’s about crafting an argument that can be explored from different angles, and connecting it all to literature in a web of trust. Generative AI can kinda-sorta generate text that almost looks a bit like this if you squint just right, but an essay is about so much more than just pumping out words to hit a required length. I mean, so much essay writing is exactly that. But that’s why we want students to learn to actually do this stuff rather than just deferring to whatever bullshit Clippy squirts into a document for them.

I’m providing feedback to a bunch of brilliant and intensely creative students, many of whom are clearly struggling with being able to write an essay at that level. It’s not about the content as much as it is about backing up your claims and doing so in a way that the reader can follow and make the leap with you to the creative insight that goes beyond that.

Finding sources is fundamentally different – for the better – than when we were starting out. Kids these days don’t have to line up to search text in microfiche or microfilm, or to access the CD-ROMs for the ERIC index, etc. They can just plop whatever question they want into a box on Google Scholar, and get high quality results in seconds. But that’s the easy part (and it’s much easier now – GOOD!). It’s the harder stuff about crafting questions, systematically and methodically connecting questions to the literature, making sense of the literature (what’s good? how can I trust it?) and developing a plan to start to answer the questions. That’s what a (good) essay is, and that can’t (shouldn’t) be replaced by tech unless we completely externalize our thinking.

Says the guy that didn’t cite anything in this mini-essay-of-a-blog-comment.