I’m excited to share something a little different for today’s post. If you’ve followed this blog for long, you know that I have been hugely influenced by the work of

More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI came out earlier this year, and I love the humane and insightful takes it offers on teaching and learning in this moment. It also, like all good books, left me with as many questions as answers. I reached out to John to see if he might respond to a few of these questions, and he graciously agreed. Our conversation is below.

ED: “More Than Words,” in addition to being a chart-topping acoustic classic of the early 90s, is also a great book title. I know decisions about titles are made in collaboration with publishers—but what ultimately attracted you to the idea of writing being “more than words”?

JW: I wish I could take credit for the title, but it was one that was proposed to me by my editor, Emily Taber, in consultation with various folks at the publisher after they saw the first full draft of the manuscript. I knew the title on my book proposal, “Writing with Robots: Staying Human in the Time of Artificial Intelligence” was a placeholder since it was more designed to get the attention of publishers than something that reflected the book I intended to write. I’m pleased to think that writing is about more than words is a sentiment that others were able to pull out of the text, and now I get to take credit for it, while planting the 90s earworm into readers of a certain age.

ED: As someone who writes a lot, and enjoys it, I’m personally convinced by your argument that writing is thinking, writing is feeling, and writing is a practice. This is how I experience the activity of writing: I start with an initial impulse, and then writing helps me explore that impulse further and understand it better. That makes tools like ChatGPT mostly irrelevant to my writing process.

Obviously, this is not the case for everyone. Many students I know, and even more advanced individuals whom I deeply respect, don’t experience writing in this way. Rather, they have a sense that they know what they think and they know what they feel but that it’s inordinately difficult for them to translate those thoughts and feelings into words. Often, these folks see generative AI as a tool that helps them do that: it can take the thoughts and feelings they have but struggle to articulate and give words to them. It’s not thinking and feeling for them; it’s simply communicating their own thoughts and feelings more clearly or eloquently than they could themselves.

I have enormous sympathy for this. What would you say to people who feel this way about their writing?

JW: I’m sympathetic to every experience of writing struggle because I’ve likely experienced that struggle myself. During graduate school, pursuing my MFA in creative writing, I wrote, at a minimum 100,000 words of fiction for three straight years. Volume was not a problem, but the quality was well below what I envisioned for myself, as compared to the urgency of what seemed to be in my head and spirit. I finished grad school pretty certain that writing was not something I should be doing.

After not doing any personal writing for a few months, I was struck by an image while I was walking in the city (Chicago) and went home and wrote a story (“The Circus Elephants Look Sad Because They Are”) that became the first short story I would ever publish.

As I describe in the book, I also simultaneously discovered that the struggles I’d been having expressing myself as I wished in graduate school had helped me develop a robust writing practice that was quite effective in the real-world job I had at the time in market research. If anyone knew this was a likely outcome of my studies, they didn’t tell me. (I wish they had.) But that fact of it is undeniable.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the struggle is the point of writing, but the truth is something like that. This isn’t to say we should always struggle or measure success by how much we struggle, or even that there aren’t occasions where removing some measure of the struggle might benefit us, but I think it’s important that everyone has experience with this struggle and success at coming out the other side of that.

School is often not a great place for that kind of experience, which is one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time. I don’t think that once struggle is experienced this means that everyone would or should become writers, but it’s something that we should at least be familiar with.

ED: Along the same lines, you write that coming up with a first draft is the most important part of the writing process for our students because it’s the most human part—the part, presumably, where all the thinking and feeling happens (or most of it). I think this is the case for me and probably most other writing teachers. But I do wonder if it’s the case for everybody. What if for some people the thinking is in the…well, thinking? One of my good friends (who identifies as neurodivergent) writes by taking a long time to think, turning over ideas and sorting them out purely in her brain for weeks on end. She then writes thousands of words, sometimes whole articles, in one focused sitting over the course of several hours. And that’s the draft. For others, I wonder if getting down a jumble of messy notes and ideas is where the thinking happens, but then putting those ideas into organized paragraphs and sentences is simply drudgery, grunt-work that generative AI could assist with. I’m a little worried that writing teachers or successful writers are making judgements about AI use based on how we learn, think, and write but that our assumptions may not hold true for people with other kinds of processes. How would you respond to that concern?

JW: Everything you describe here sounds like writing to me, but that’s because I see writing as much more than just the moments where I’m putting words on a page. I do a lot of writing when I’m walking the dogs or on the Peloton. I’ve had the experience of waking up in the middle of the night and realizing some of my brain has been writing and then trying to capture that notion before it slips away from me.

I don’t think I fit any definition of neurodivergent, but I’m similar to your friend in that I’m a long thinker, though often that thinking also takes the form of writing. A bunch of what wound up in the book first took form as posts at Inside Higher Ed or my newsletter that were then subject to additional thought. A big part of developing one’s writing practice (the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and habits of mind of writers) is developing that knowledge of one’s own process, so whatever anyone does to make it work is a-ok with me. People looking at my process from the outside would probably be horrified (I know my 8th grade teacher who insisted on outlines first would be), but it works for me, emphasis on for me.

My concern around AI use is when it removes some of the learning friction that would help people develop their process.

ED: I was really struck by your ideas about taste and the implied claim that one of our roles as teachers is to help students explore, develop, shape, and express their own tastes. I’m interested in this in part because I find that more and more students come into my classes without much idea of what they do and don’t like, what compels or engages them. Not just in writing—in everything. When I ask about their hobbies and interests, a nontrivial number of them just…don’t seem to have any (or at least none they’re willing to tell me about). Last year, I asked students to tell me their favorite holiday songs for a class playlist, and a few of them just shrugged and said “Jingle Bells,” simply because it was the most popular song they could think of. I’m not saying that students’ ambivalence about corny Christmas songs presages the end of civilization or anything. But I do worry about how life in the “Filterworld,” as Kyle Chayka terms it, prohibits the development of “unique human intelligences” and the fact that school doesn’t seem to be helping. What are some things you think we can do, as teachers, to help students discover and hone their own unique tastes?

JW: I’m a big fan of giving students access to experiences that simply allow them to react to something as the humans they are (rather than as students) and then have them reflect on their reactions. I’ve done this by reading short stories out loud, or playing music, or showing short humor videos or requiring students to go literally have an “experience” in the world that they respond to.

If a student is shown something humorous and they laugh, that’s an expression of taste. If they hear a song and tap their toes or want to hear it again, that’s taste. If they’re involved with a short story, that’s taste. We can then try to articulate what it is we like and build that sense of our own individual tastes bit by bit. It does take practice though. We’re wired to respond, but we’re not wired to think about our responses.

ED: A related question I have is about the “spikiness” of human writing and experience, and the ways all that gets sanded down by AI. You share many moving anecdotes from your own life in the book, and I’ve heard interviewers ask you about a few of them. The one that most resonated with me is one nobody else, as far as I know, has mentioned, and it’s barely more than an aside in the book. It’s your experience of attending a community theater performance of Spamalot that was “an exceedingly game effort by every member of the production, but obviously well short of Broadway quality.” And yet, at the end of the performance, you spontaneously sprang to your feet in enthusiastic appreciation of the achievement.

As someone who has attended, and participated in, a lot of bad community theater, I was so moved by this. Some of my fondest memories are associated with very poor attempts at theatre-making. But of course, the point is not to put on a beautifully polished performance so much as to engage in the experience, to learn something about art or ourselves, to connect with each other or with our community, to have fun—in short, to indulge our humanity for a little while. If you could somehow magically create a ChatGPT for community theater that would improve the quality of the productions, you would absolutely ruin the entire enterprise.

I worry that we’re all having fewer and fewer of these kinds of spiky human experiences. Acting or painting or dancing or writing badly, just for the sake of experiencing it or connecting with someone else, isn’t valued by anyone. It’s not productive; it can’t be monetized; it won’t get a good grade. But I also recognize that this is a hard sell for most people, students and teachers included. “Make bad art!” “Value poor writing!” “Fully indulge your humanity!” I don’t think people get it. How can we convince our communities that this stuff is worthwhile?

JW: We can convince everyone else that this stuff is worthwhile by going to more exceedingly sincere, but not super fantastic community theater! I think the roots of this problem are very deep and the way that school has been increasingly organized around so-called “college and career prep” is largely to blame. The disappearance of art and music classes from early grades is a tragedy, not because we’re missing out on great art but because the attempt to make something is worthwhile in and of itself, and then sharing these attempts with the world is additionally affirming.

My grade school had an art show every single semester where every student displayed their “best” work of the half year. Our work was hung on the walls with our name and grade below it.

To say I was not a gifted artist is beyond an understatement, but I still have a cross stitch from fifth grade meant to honor my parents’ alma maters, (University of Michigan/University of Wisconsin) that was made an “M” when hung one way and a “W” when hung the other way with the colors of the letter split between the Michigan maize and blue and Wisconsin’s red and white.

This was not art, but it’s something I was still proud of because I made it.

ED: One aspect of teaching that we both think about a lot is assessment and grading. In fact, my first (conscious) encounter with your work was your chapter in Susan Blum’s Ungrading, the one with the extended metaphor about Wile E. Coyote as a “hero of ungrading.” This is a metaphor that, I think, illustrates your own “spikiness”; it’s something ChatGPT would never come up with in a million years. I was so struck by it that it made me flip to the author bios in the back of the book asking, “Who the heck is this guy?”

Anyway, in More Than Words, you write about some early experiences of grading in which you had the sense that you were not “reading” student work so much as “processing” it. I think a lot of instructors, if we’re honest with ourselves, feel this way! How did you make the move from processing student writing to reading and engaging with it on a deeper level?

JW: It was a move made out of desperation because I realized that this work I had been doing for quite some time and that I liked and valued was becoming drudgery and I was increasingly alienated from my own job. The journey became one of examining my values around reading and writing and trying to live those values in my teaching by focusing on what I thought was important. This is where “the writer’s practice” came from, with the alternative grading being the final piece of the puzzle that allowed me to focus on those elements of the writer’s practice.

I think most faculty are drawn to their fields at least initially out of a sense of fascination. I was sort of instantly fascinated about the challenge of teaching so that shift was a way for me to maintain that fascination by continuing to experiment. If folks find themselves stagnating like I was, my advice is to try something, even if it winds up being a Wile E. Coyote-style disaster. Mr. Coyote always comes back for more. There’s always another semester, another class.

ED: What has to change, structurally, for more instructors to be able to move from “processing” to “reading”? What kinds of things can we do in the absence of those structural changes to make assessment more meaningful for students and teachers?

JW: My advice is to focus on reading not to assess but to appreciate, and to work from that place of reaction and taste, rather than judgment. The mistake I was making was to focus on the (inevitable) errors my students were going to make on school assignments, rather than treating their writing as writing. This also required me to make sure what I was asking them to do had authentic purpose and audiences so students could tackle a problem that wasn’t ultimately just something to be graded.

ED: This last question is cheating a little, since it’s about something you said on a recent podcast episode rather than in your book. On Tea for Teaching, you mentioned that you were really interested in the idea of learning through apprenticeship and also concerned that technologies like generative AI might threaten apprenticeship models.

I’m interested in this for two reasons. The first is because you mentioned a kind of apprenticeship in your own experience of learning to teach. Specifically, you talked about how transformative Ken Bain’s book What the Best College Teachers Do was for you—I think you said “literally life changing.” That’s what your own book Why They Can’t Write did for me. It completely transformed the way I think about teaching writing. So, this seems like a good opportunity to thank you for that!

But the second reason this interested me is because I’ve been toying with the idea of bringing an apprenticeship model into my writing classes for a few years now. I think the idea first occurred to me when I read Stop Talking: Indigenous Ways of Teaching and Learning and Difficult Dialogues in Higher Education and was inspired by a kind of indigenous pedagogical approach that’s not based on instruction and explanation but rather, in part, on “observation and emulation”: a learner coming alongside a teacher to watch them work, reflect on that, and then try to do it themselves.

“Stop Talking” offers an interesting challenge to classes that are all about words (and has interesting intersections, I think, with your own argument that we should think of writing as being about “more than words”). Anyway, this has run on for too long, so I’ll get to my real question: Do you have any thoughts about how we might bring apprenticeship as a way of learning into the writing classroom? Or even into the pedagogies of other disciplines?

JW: I’m sort of flabbergasted that Why They Can’t Write had the same effect on you that What the Best College Teachers Do had on me, so I thank you for that, even though I have a hard time believing it.

I’m thinking about what Ken Bain’s book, my book and the book you cite have in common, and I think is the combination of “authenticity” and “emulation.” The teachers that Bain highlights are, above everything else, authentic and the expression of that authenticity informs every aspect of how they teach. We look at them as sources for emulation, trying to capture the spirit without copying them exactly - because that would be inauthentic.

The core argument of Why They Can’t Write is that we have students doing writing “simulations” rather than giving them authentic writing experiences. That said, we often start as writers by emulating others we admire as we find our own unique voices.

There is an obvious cultural aspect to all of this, and unfortunately the culture of schooling has become increasingly separate from authentic learning.

The idea that learning has become separate from schooling is a bleak note for our conversation to end on. But recent books like Susan Blum’s Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning and John’s More Than Words give me hope that we can recapture some of authenticity and joy we’ve been missing lately.

Many thanks to John for sharing his thoughts here. If you teach writing in any capacity, or if you’re a writer yourself, you should read More Than Words ASAP!