A nudge from the machine

In my first-year writing classes, I typically start with five minutes of freewriting. Since some folks don’t know where to start when they set pen to paper or fingers to keys, I use a random word generator to give students a nudge if they need it.

The fish listened intently to what the frogs had to say.

Today, I realized the random word generator I use also has a random sentence generator. According to the FAQ on that page, the sentences are not computer-generated; instead, the site draws from a database of human-authored sentences. (It isn’t clear where these sentences come from, although the FAQ says it’s possible to “donate” your own sentences to their database.)

Pat ordered a ghost pepper pie.

Next week, a handful of my Framingham State colleagues and I will start planning this year’s retreat for first-year writing instructors. The topic of this year’s retreat will be the impact of ChatGPT and large-language models (LLMs) in composition classrooms. Although much of the media coverage of LLMs focuses on plagiarism and cheating, I’m equally interested in the ways tools such as ChatGPT can be used ethically, as a way to kickstart (not replace) creative and critical thinking.

I used to live in my neighbor’s fishpond, but the aesthetic wasn’t to my taste.

Earlier this week, I heard an NPR story in which a college student described the ways he uses ChatGPT as a brainstorming tool in his academic work. In a textual analysis of The Iliad, for example, he used ChatGPT to generate possible thesis statements, then he chose a thesis he agreed with and asked ChatGPT to write an outline. Given that outline, he went back to the text to find illustrative quotes, then he wrote his own paragraphs to flesh out the argument, creating an essay that would be difficult to flag using existing plagiarism-detection tools.

Carol drank the blood as if she were a vampire.

Using ChatGPT to write an entire essay is clearly wrong, but is it wrong to use LLMs to help with brainstorming, organization, or other composition tasks? I had an international student this past semester tell me he uses ChatGPT to correct the grammar of his essays, for example, and I (personally) don’t have a problem with that. Is relying upon spell- or grammar-check (or hiring an editor) unethical? What about tools such as Grammarly and auto-correct? Does every single idea in a given essay have to come from your own brain, or is it okay to use a random word generator or quick Google search to jumpstart your thinking?

The fifty mannequin heads floating in the pool kind of freaked them out.

We encourage students to ask their professors and writing tutors for help, and we know students sometimes ask their friends, roommates, or even parents to read their essays. How many brilliant essays started as thought-provoking conversations where multiple people contributed ideas? Does asking for help or conferring with peers count as cheating? If asking a human for help is okay, why is collaborating with a computer different?

I can’t believe this is the eighth time I’m smashing open my piggy bank on the same day!

When it comes to the impact of LLMs in the first-year writing classroom, I have more questions than answers. I know tools such as ChatGPT are here to stay, and I know this generation of students will use generative AI in the workplace of the future. Given those realities, teaching students how to use technology responsibly and transparently is more helpful than banning technology outright. Sometimes allowing (and admitting) the randomness of real life leads to something creative and curious.

Although I myself wrote these paragraphs (with occasional grammar and usage corrections from Google Docs), I did not write the random sentences in between.

 

A series of seconds

My Comp I students are starting to write their final “Theory of Writing” project, and to prepare I’ve asked them to read novelist Zadie Smith talking about the craft of writing. In her essay, Smith describes something she calls OPD, or Obsessive Perspective Disorder, which she faces whenever she starts a new novel and has to figure out what perspective to tell the story from.

Since my students aren’t writing novels, I’ve asked them to consider any writing obsessions they might have: do they always write about family or food or work or sports? I obsessively write about time: how much I have, how much I need, how quickly it’s passing, or what I plan or want to do with it. Some people crave money or drugs or food or sex: what I want, always, is more time.

As a writer, I’m obsessed with what I call Time Travel, where I compare what I’m doing today, this week, this month, or this year with what I did at the same time back then. Yesterday, for example, I shot a photo of bloodroot, just as I did almost exactly one year ago; the year before that, we had April snow flurries. My blog, handwritten journal, photo archive, and social media posts all allow me to look back and compare Now and Then. The passage of time–like sand through the hourglass–fascinates me in an almost hypnotic way.

As I age, I realize I’ve always been an Old Soul. Young people tend to see time as an infinite resource, but I’ve never fallen for that trap. I’ve always known that time is short; I’ve always known our lives are wending their inevitable way toward death. For me, writing is like creating a personal time capsule: I tell myself that someday in the future, I’ll want to look back on the person I was today. Recording is a way of remembering, and remembering is how we briefly hold onto a series of seconds as they silently slip away.

 

I am not a robot

Yesterday at a Babson Writing Program meeting, my colleagues and I had an engaging conversation about AI-generated writing in the college classroom: an ongoing discussion we’ve had since ChatGPT has dominated headlines.

At this meeting, a colleague shared a news item about a ChatGPT-generated email that Vanderbilt University sent in response to the mass shooting at Michigan State. I wasn’t surprised that a university administrator had sent a bot-generated email that included a tag marking the text as AI-generated: I’ve always suspected administrative responses to tragedy are more canned than sincere. Instead, what struck me about this story was how perfectly the bot nailed administrative condolence-speak. The email wasn’t convincing because the bot sounded human; the email was convincing because this sort of communication always sounds robotic.

After yesterday’s conversation, I spent some time playing with ChatGPT. Inspired by the assignment my Research Writing students are currently working on, I asked the bot to generate a discourse community analysis of the Brookline Bird Club, an example of a discourse community I’ve mentioned in class.

It was thrilling and a bit frightening to see the words quickly appear on the screen: the bot types much faster than I do, and without pauses to think and sip tea. But while the bot accurately described what the Brookline Bird Club is and how it fits the general parameters of a discourse community–namely, a group of people with a shared goal or interest who use a shared lingo to communicate–the “analysis” the bot generated was exactly the kind of bland, obvious generalizing I don’t want my students to produce.

Yes, I already know the BBC is a discourse community: that’s why I suggested it as a topic. What I want to hear from an analysis, then, is how well does the BBC use specific examples of discourse to create community and further group goals?

That, of course, is a thinking-style question, so exactly the kind of thing a bot isn’t good at. What I want my human students to do in their writing isn’t simply to churn out text: the bots are already better than us at that task. Instead, I want students to do the things that robots can’t do: namely, think deeply and critically.

In a discourse community analysis, I don’t want students to repeat the same bland platitudes about how groups bring like-minded people together. Instead, I want students to look closely at specific examples of discourse to determine how well those texts work.

Do these texts bring community members closer together? Do they encourage lively discussion–a true sharing of ideas–or do they stymie or even quash communication? Do these texts encourage healthy dialogue among all members or only between a few? In a word, do the utterances produced by this community encourage actual human interaction–the kind of communication we all crave–or do they serve to turn us all into robots: mere cogs in the discourse machine?

When they work, discourse communities (like lively meetings with colleagues) make us feel more human, not less. ChatGPT might be good enough to write an insipid analysis or canned-sounding condolence, but it isn’t smart enough (yet) to know whether it is wise to click “Submit.”

 

A form of controlled panic

Sometimes when a new acquaintance asks me what I do for a living, I say I teach panic management strategies.

Writing is a form of controlled panic. There is that sudden sinking feeling when you face the blank page, again, and wonder how you’re ever going to fill it. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve started from scratch before: there’s always a flash of panic that this time, for the first time, the words won’t show up.

Writing isn’t about getting rid of this perennial sense of panic; it’s about managing it. You befriend the Inner Critic who says you’re a nobody with nothing to say. You silently nod, smile, then ignore this voice, treating it as an annoying but ultimately innocuous stranger sitting next to you on the bus. No need to heed the opinions of someone who doesn’t even know you.

Managing panic means learning to live with it, recognizing it as a burden that doesn’t slow or stop you. Panic is like an albatross around your neck: annoying, yes, but neither final or fatal.

Writing is about scribbling on even though panic is screaming in your ear: in time, with practice, you’ll learn to overlook and overcome it. “Oh, yes,” you’ll say to yourself. “You again.”

***

In my first-year classes at both Framingham State and Babson, we start with five minutes of freewriting. Students are free to write about whatever they’d like, but I post three random words to give students a nudge if they have nothing else to write about.

Today’s post comes from yesterday’s five-minute entry in response to the word “Panic.”

 

Stone soup

Some days when you start to brew a blog post, you find the cupboard is bare. You have nothing to say, or nothing new to say, or nothing you want to hear yourself say, again.

This is a different kind of obstacle from not having time to write. When I’m busy, I often have plenty to say: so much going on, but so little time to talk about it. That’s a problem, but it’s not the problem I’m describing here.

No, what I’m describing is this: you’ve finally carved out a time to write, but you arrive at the page empty: no inspiration, no ideas, nada, zilch. These are the times when you cook some stone soup.

How do you make stone soup? You heat a brimming pot of Nothing to Say to a boil, then you toss in whatever random things you have at hand: a stone, a leaf, a castoff shoe. A bit of trash collected in a corner. An idea or random insight. A question, curiosity, or complaint.

Bring these to a boil, stir then let simmer, and voila! A hearty blog-post to warm even the coldest day.

 

In with the old

This morning I sorted through stationery, bundling the monthly letters I wrote to myself in 2020 and making room for the letters I’ll write to myself in 2022. This is a habit I’ve kept for the past few years: every month, I read a letter I wrote the previous year, then I write a letter to my Future Self.

I’m realizing my perennial reluctance to set New Year’s Resolutions isn’t based on any reluctance to set goals for myself–I set goals for myself all the time. Instead, this reluctance stems from an aversion to setting new goals, the whole spirit of New Year’s resolutions resting on the attitude of “out with the old, in with the new.”

I don’t want to start any new habits in 2022; instead, I want to continue cultivating the habits that have sustained me so far. Instead of “out with the old,” I want to continue in with the old.

Every year, I set the same basic goals for myself: read 50 books, write daily, blog more, and get a certain number of steps (currently, my daily step goal is 17,000). Every year I also resolve to take lots of pictures: at least one a day.

Looking back on the past few years, I’ve kept these goals, mostly. Throughout the pandemic, I’ve journaled nearly every day, and I have a shelf of notebooks to show for it. I wear a Fitbit to track my steps, and I use Goodreads to track the books I’ve read. For the past few years, I’ve religiously taken at least one photo every day even though I’ve been largely remiss about publicly posting those photos.

The only goal I continue to struggle with is the intention to blog more regularly. Given the choice between posting to my blog and writing in my journal, my journal always wins. If I had a secretary to transcribe each day’s scribbles so I could easily share them online, I’d have no shortage of things to share. But since I am my own secretary, editor, and muse, there are rarely enough hours in the day.

Every new year, I tell myself that THIS is the year when all this daily writing–all the journal-keeping and blog-posting–will result in an actual Book, “publish a book” being the biggest un-checked item on what is probably the world’s shortest bucket list. But like the opening montage in the movie Up where one mishap after another prevents Carl and Ellie from taking their dream trip to Paradise Falls, the elusive Book I presumably have in me is perpetually pushed to the back burner.

The last print book I finished in 2021 was Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness, where the Book within a boy named Benny literally cries out to be written. Unlike Benny, my Book has yet to speak to me, at least in any language I can hear. But my notebooks still cry to be filled, so I continue to show up at their pages.

 

Three ways

As the end of the term approaches, my first-year students are working on a Theory of Writing project that asks them to consider how they work as writers.

My students at Babson College have been working on this assignment for several weeks, and my students at Framingham State are just starting. In both cases, I asked students to read an essay by novelist Zadie Smith in which she talks about her writing craft.

One of the things Smith does in her essay is describe the phases of a novel’s composition. In discussing this essay with my students, I asked them to consider the steps or stages they go through when working on a paper, and I in turn considered the steps I go through when crafting a blog post.

1. Start by writing by hand, in a notebook, about whatever comes to mind.
2. Go back and type up relevant or usable bits from that hand-written first draft, wordsmithing sentences as I go.
3. Re-read the entire thing, adding transitions, deleting redundant or clunky passages, and adding additional paragraphs or a conclusion as necessary
4. Add a photo, decide on a tagline for social media, and publish.

This first approach is the ideal workflow for me: start by writing by hand, usually with no (or only a vague) idea of what I want to say. But when life is busy, sometimes the process looks more like this:

1. Open Google Docs
2. Start typing on a broad topic, agonizing over sentences as I write
3. Step 3: Re-read, revise, and post as described above.

This second approach is quicker insofar as I eliminate the step of writing by hand…but it’s more tortuous. If I start with writing by hand, my thoughts flow more quickly and naturally. For me, thinking on paper is akin to thinking out loud, but safer: only I see that initial scribbled draft. When I write by hand in my journal, I’m chasing ideas, not wordsmithing sentences. This means my ideas come out fresh and raw, with the reassuring knowledge that I’ll make them pretty later.

If I go straight to typing, my attitude toward composition is different. I’m more hesitant and halting. I pause over sentences and go back to re-read, spending as much time going backwards as going forwards. Although these typed drafts are still rough, they feel more formal and intimidating. I’m more mindful of audience–that is, the fact that someone will eventually read this–and that makes me spend more time hemming and hawing over every sentence..

If blog-writing Process One is my most ideal writing scenario and Process Two is what I do when life gets busy, blog-writing Process Three is what I rely upon when I’m even busier. When I’m really, really busy, I sometimes post directly to the WordPress app on my phone, typing with my thumbs to comment on a picture I’ve uploaded. But this third approach is so far from my ideal, I hesitate to even mention it.

 

An audience of one

My Babson students are currently working on a project my Framingham State students will start next week: a theory of writing. This assignment comes at the almost-end of a semester that started with students writing a literacy narrative, so I’ve been envisioning the term as coming full circle. In September, I asked students to reflect upon a specific event that shaped their attitudes toward reading and writing, and now in November, I’m asking them to articulate the larger role writing plays in their intellectual life.

Writers love to write about writing. When we started working on this project, I asked students to read Zadie Smith’s “That Crafty Feeling” as an entry into the genre of writers examining their craft, and I also pointed students toward my blog category on “Writing & Creativity.” But if you’re a first-year college student who has written a lot for school but don’t necessarily see yourself as a capital-W Writer, it can be daunting to try to explain the larger role writing plays in your life.

I feel bad for students who have spent twelve years of their young lives writing predominantly for teachers. We learn spoken language naturally, babbling then chattering as children, then continuing to talk as we grow older, but reading and writing must be taught. The compulsory nature of reading and writing–the fact that many students read and write only when required and only when graded–means many students see writing as a chore. How can you grow fluent in writing–how can you learn to think with your hand, which is how I describe my journal-keeping–if you only write with a teacher reading over your shoulder?

As a naturally bookish child, I was lucky: from an early age, reading and writing were my almost-native tongue. When students approach me and tentatively ask what I’m looking for in a given assignment, I have to stifle the urge to shout “How do I know what I’m looking for until you surprise me with what you’re thinking?” Until you learn to think for yourself–until you learn how to find then follow your own inner urge–lessons and practice and feedback will turn you into a compliant writer, not an insightful one.

I am, I’ve decided, a selfish writer: after years of journal-keeping, I recognize that I write primarily for myself, even when I have an ostensible audience. I write for my inner ear–my own sense, that is, of how a sentence should sound–and I write to make sense of things: for me, writing and thinking are almost one in the same. How can I know what I think until I’ve scribbled it out on the page, or found it under my keyboard-tapping fingers? Even after all these years of blogging, I realize my real audience is me–an audience of one–and everyone else is just eavesdropping.

 

Momentum vs. inertia

I’ve made a list of blog post topics for the coming days: one way of leveraging the law of momentum over the law of inertia. When you’re out of the practice of blogging, it feels impossible to think up topics to write about: when you aren’t writing, it is natural to believe you have nothing to say. This is the law of inertia: it’s difficult to start doing something you haven’t already been doing.

But once you start doing something, it’s easier to continue: this is the law of momentum. The more you write, the more you think of things to write about. The quality or brilliance of your thoughts doesn’t change; you just adjust your expectations. Instead of waiting for an Obviously Brilliant thought to show up, you learn to embrace ideas that are Good Enough. Once you do that, other Good-Enoughs come flooding in.

During the month of November, I’m trying to blog something–a photo and at least a sentence–every day, even if that means posting from my phone with my thumbs. Instead of “saving” my blog for longer posts about deep thoughts, I want to return to the habit of posting more frequently. If you lower your expectations far enough–only a sentence, nothing sustained or brilliant–the law of momentum takes over: one sentence leads to another, and one idea invites its friends.

Now at occasional moments throughout the day, I think of random ideas for blog posts: nothing profound, just a phrase or idea that’s good enough to spur a sentence. And now that I have some seeds for sentences, I have the antidote to inertia: a place to start and a way to get rolling. Once you set one word after another, the next will follow, then the next and the next and the next.

 

The blog of delights

This weekend I started reading Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, which I have wanted to read since hearing him interviewed on NPR months ago, before the pandemic, when we took delights for granted.

Gay’s short, almost-daily essays about life’s simple pleasures read like blog or journal entries–in one of them, in fact, Gay talks about how his sentences unspool differently when he writes by hand, relishing what he calls the “the loop-de-looping” of written language.

I agree. Handwriting a long, wending sentence–a sentence that flows and meanders like water–feels different than typing a long, complicated sentence. The cursive of handwriting rolls and curves in a sinuous, continuous way that clackety-clack keyboard strikes do not. A typewriter or computer keyboard is a percussive instrument, whereas cursive words written by pen on paper are like woodwinds, melodious and fluid.

Reading Gay’s book reminds me of the days–the good old days–when I blogged frequently, almost daily, versus infrequently if at all. My blog used to be my online Book of Delights, each entry capturing the immediacy of daily life and its small joys.

I still faithfully write in my journal, but those pages don’t always capture delights. Instead, too often (especially during this pandemic) my journal has been a repository of worry and dismay: a Book of Frets and Grievances. And although Instagram is occasionally a place where I share photos of tiny delights, I save my blog for longer essays, and in so doing, I too often find I don’t have much to say or time to say it in.

I’d like to return to a more faithful practice of delight–an intentional practice of noticing, cataloguing, and sharing the things that bring me joy. Gay makes the process seem easy to do–it doesn’t take many words or much time to capture life’s simple pleasures.