The rise of AI has caused anxiety about the future of writing instruction. If the technology can write鈥攐r help people write鈥攓uickly 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鈥檓 quite certain the answer among educators and school leaders is, overwhelmingly, yes鈥攐f course we do. But their rationale, from what I鈥檝e seen, tends to point to cognitive benefits: organizing one鈥檚 thoughts, constructing persuasive arguments, faithfully reproducing observations and events on the page, anticipating objections, and the like.
All of that is true. But it鈥檚 missing another emerging, less intuitive reason why this instruction is crucial: AI is likely to make good human writing鈥攚hether produced independently or with assistance from a large language model鈥攔arer 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.
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