Is Writing Obsolete?

In earlier essays I argued that writing has become increasingly marginalized in schools. When we stop measuring something, we often stop valuing it. The result is that writing receives less attention in many classrooms.

My question this day is, does it really matter that schools no longer emphasize writing, and many completely neglect it? The argument I hear in many of my circles is, it’s obsolete. AI can do everything for us now. If AI writes better and faster than we do, why should anyone learn to write? That is the question I wish to explore.

Writing, if anything, has become more important now that machines are generating the text. What may become obsolete is the idea that writing is mainly about producing words. Writing has always looked like that from the outside because the finished product is words on a page. But beneath the surface, writing serves several deeper purposes. Writing is thinking. Writing demands judgement and analysis. Writing communicates identity. Most important, writing is a struggle. We lose writing, and we risk losing one of the most important ways humans make meaning, develop judgment, and express identity.

Writing is Thinking

Many people believe they know what they think until they try to write it down. I had a student a few years ago in a creative writing course. She had what researchers call “writing apprehension” which looks a lot like math anxiety (Daly & Miller, 1975). Terror! Terror when being asked to write anything more than your first and last name.

It is critical to allow emerging writers to express what is important to them. If they love basketball, let them write about basketball. If they love animals, have them describe their favorite pet, or an animal they dreamed of having. This girl just froze when I asked her to write a short paragraph about something she loves. I asked her to write about a hobby, a sport, something she loves to do. Silence. She had a pen and a piece of paper and a blind stare. I may as well have asked her to conduct open heart surgery.

I realized she was terrified. She was terrified of being wrong, of writing wrong. I said, “There is no wrong writing here. You are not being graded on any writing conventions. I just want you to write a paragraph or two about something you love.” She was skeptical. Then I took another approach. “Why don’t you just tell me about something you love to do after school.” She described one of the clubs she was involved with and the people in the club, and why she enjoyed it. I jumped and said, “THAT! That is exactly what I want you to write.” Still, she was apprehensive. She couldn’t connect the fact that writing is simply putting words on paper to what her thoughts were. She finally trusted me and wrote a page on her after school activity. She was shocked when I returned it to her not with a bunch of red lines and corrections, but with comments asking her questions about how she liked specific aspects of this activity, and I asked about her friends involved with the activity.

Writing is communicating. The written essay on this topic drew the student and me, the teacher, closer. Was that the time to correct all the grammar and punctuation, the organization, run on sentences, weak descriptions… blah blah blah. No. That was the time to develop her love of writing and make the connection of expressing her identity and her humanity.

While she expresses herself through words, she will gradually refine those words and grow into writing that adheres to all the standards. It’s a starting point. She has to struggle to grow, and writing is that struggle. It is an act that forces you to clarify vague ideas, discover contradictions, organize evidence, and decide what matters. Without the struggle your brain will not develop to its potential and your growth will be stunted.

An LLM can produce a paragraph instantly, but it cannot do the human work of deciding what you believe. The LLM didn’t experience that after school program that influenced this student. More importantly, the LLM robs that student of the struggle and growth that makes her a better thinker. Few processes rival writing that help a person grow into critical and creative thinking that uses reasoning to communicate in any form. If my student had typed “'write a paragraph about my after-school club” into ChatGPT, she'd have had a flawless paragraph and none of the discovery. Nothing for me to ask her about, and nothing that was hers.

Writing Creates Judgment

LLMs are writing literature reviews for students everyday. Research “assistants” spit out full literature reviews in seconds. However, it takes hours to write one yourself. I had another student who I introduced one of these incredible AI research assistants to. I love Scopus AI because it serves as a great starting point for mining literature. When used ethically and intentionally, it can help researchers and scholars dig for literature faster than poring over multiple irrelevant articles. However, when used unethically, this program can also summarize and synthesize the articles thus bypassing an integral part of developing critical thinking skills.

When I showed this student the program, I said, let’s put in your purpose and problem statements and see what articles it comes up with and compare it to the literature you have already built out. Within seconds, Scopus AI spit out almost his entire literature review complete with themes and subthemes that my student had spent 18 months developing. I thought I saw a tear run down his cheek.

I imagined what was going through my student’s mind: hours of evaluating sources, discovering patterns, interpreting, summarizing articles, synthesizing key information, determining conflicting results, discerning which arguments are stronger. That process is how expertise develops. I reassured him by explaining that conducting that literature review himself, manually, created a struggle that strengthened his skills, not atrophied them. Using the research assistant should help you navigate like a GPS, but if you never navigate yourself, your sense of direction gets weaker.

AI does not have to make writing obsolete. Writing with AI can be its own kind of thinking. Drafting alongside it, arguing with its suggestions, rejecting what doesn't ring true, revising: that is real intellectual work. Calculators didn't end math; they changed what we spend math time on. Using AI intentionally and thoughtfully can be enlightening and produce incredible personal growth. However, you have to know how to navigate before the GPS helps you. My student could evaluate Scopus AI's themes because he had spent 18 months building his own. A student who has never struggled through a literature review has nothing to measure the output against. AI can be a thinking partner, but only for someone who has already learned to think on the page.

Writing Communicates Identity

Machines can generate competent text, however they cannot replicate your experiences, values, observations, or commitments. They cannot replicate that afterschool program my student reluctantly wrote about. How can anything a machine spits out be authentic or at best merely simple facts or data points if the machine has never had a human experience?

The most interesting writing has always been less about information and more about perspective. People don't read good memoirs, essays, or research interpretations merely to learn facts. They read to encounter another mind. In qualitative research, in particular, writing conveys meaning deeply embedded in the human experience.

Why use my own words when AI's words may sound better? Because the purpose of writing is not merely communication of information. It is communication of self.

Writing Is Struggle

Every example in this essay points to the same truth. Thinking, judgment, and identity are the byproducts of struggling through writing. Bjork and Bjork (2020) call struggles in learning “desirable difficulties.” Writing requires struggle. We struggle to find the right word, organize our thoughts, decide what we believe. We struggle to communicate clearly. The struggle is uncomfortable, frustrating, and even sometimes defeating. My dissertation students often say, “The struggle is real.” Indeed it is.

But what if we never had to struggle? Researchers are beginning to see this, too. An MIT Media Lab study, Your Brain on ChatGPT (Kosmyna et al., 2025), found lower brain engagement and weaker recall of their own essays among students who wrote with an LLM. Many could not quote a sentence they had "written" minutes earlier. The struggle is the learning. Without struggle our brains would never grow. Writing provides the weights, treadmill, stair stepper, and any other gym equipment needed to strengthen your mind and soul. Writing is the yoga for your brain that helps you become reflective to turn data points and information into something more meaningful.

The purpose of writing is more than merely producing text. Writing helps humans think, understand, persuade, remember, and connect. AI can help produce text, but it cannot replace the human reasons for writing. In a strange way, AI may be forcing us to rediscover what writing was for all along.

So, is writing obsolete? I don't think so. Writing develops thinking and  judgment. Writing helps us discover and communicate who we are. The real value of writing was never fancy words on a  page adhering to strict conventions. The value has always been what happened inside the writer.

Yet that conclusion raises a larger question. If machines can increasingly write for us, calculators can calculate for us, and AI can read and summarize information for us, what becomes of the traditional foundations of education? And if reading, writing, and arithmetic can all be outsourced to technology, what exactly are schools supposed to teach?

That's the question we'll explore next.

References

Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2020). Desirable difficulties in theory and practice. Journal of Applied research in Memory and Cognition, 9(4), 475.

Daly, J. A., & Miller, M. D. (1975). The empirical development of an instrument to measure writing apprehension. Research in the Teaching of English, 9(3), 242-249.

Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., Situ, J., Liao, X. H., Beresnitzky, A. V., ... & Maes, P. (2025). Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.08872, 4, 206.