Brandon Ambrosino writes that college and university students have been taught write their academic papers in a detached, formal tone.George Walker IV/The Associated Press
Brandon Ambrosino is an assistant teaching professor in the Theology and Religious Studies Department at Villanova University. His second book, Laughing in a Tomb: An Experiment in Camp Theology, will be published in October.
A colleague recently told me to avoid using contractions in my writing. This colleague wasn’t being rude, they were just reminding me of “how things are” in the academy. I was up for a promotion, and to maximize my chances of getting it, I had to write in the academic voice the committee would be expecting. Anyone who has been to college or university knows what I’m talking about. It’s the voice we were taught to use for papers, the one we teach our students to use for papers: detached, unemotional, formal, objective, contraction-less. This voice is the only one worthy of good, academic prose.
This voice, we tell students, should not be your voice, your everyday voice, the one you use to order pizza and catch up with friends. It should not contain slang or the colloquialisms that colour your speech. It should not, in other words, sound like you. When you sit down to write a paper, you should make yourself imperceptible, send your voice to the corner for a timeout.
For too long, we’ve taught students not to develop their own voices, to take themselves out of their writing. Is it any wonder they are now using artificial intelligence to write their papers? We’ve forbidden students from showing up to the writing process, or else warned them to take every precaution to make sure they leave no trace that they were ever there. They’ve just taken our instructions to their logical conclusion. If they believe their own voices are unwanted in academia, then why would they share them with us? We’ve conditioned students to remove themselves from their papers. And so they have.
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In Travels With Charley, a travelogue by John Steinbeck recording his and his dog’s road trip across the United States, Steinbeck expresses sorrow over the rise of what he calls “packaged English.” Regional speech was “in the process of disappearing” thanks, in part, to technologies such as radio and television, which “destroy localness.”
“Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech,” he wrote. “I who love words and the endless possibility of words am saddened by this inevitability. For with local accent will disappear local tempo. The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of the poetry of place and time must go. And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless.”
Steinbeck was talking about the effects of nationalized communication on human language, but he could just as easily have been talking about the increasing academization of writing. Open a well-respected academic journal to a random page, and chances are the prose will sound packaged, standardized, flavourless.
Why should this be the way our writing sounds? Why package creative, world-changing, policy-upending ideas in boring prose meant to hide our personalities? Why do the same journals that are on the hunt for Earth-shattering hypotheses refuse to take seriously any academic who deviates from the genre? We’ve bought rather uncritically into the notion that knowledge can only be communicated one way, and then we’ve passed this idea along to our students as dogma.
But we shouldn’t be encouraging our students to sound like us. We should be encouraging them to sound the way they sound. That’s how we can resist AI further creeping into our classrooms. We can remind students that it’s not only their good ideas that we want to hear, but their unique voices, with all their localness, all their quirks, silliness and idioms. And yes, with all their grammatical errors and syntactical misfires.
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We should teach them how to be on the lookout for writerly mistakes, but we should keep in mind that style is not an error. So many of the old writing rules our teachers forced us to observe (don’t end a sentence with a preposition; don’t use passive voice; be judicious with an ellipsis) are editorial preferences. And while punctuation can be wrong, we tend to forget that the marks we distribute throughout our writing are simply about readability. If a student’s prose flows nicely … why should I care whether they used a semicolon where I might have used a comma?
Many of us have long taught students to show up for themselves, to speak up, to advocate for themselves. How serious are we about that goal if we invite them to use their voice, but then lower their grades when we discover their voice is punctuated and stylized differently than our own?
Perhaps educators might push back against what I’m suggesting by arguing that objectivity is the name of the game. But as social scientists have long reminded us, the “objective” voice only sounds objective; if we listen closely, however, it nevertheless betrays its own agenda. A view from nowhere is not possible: that’s why academics open their work with an acknowledgment of their subject positions, their goals, the motivations for writing, etc.
But just because subjectivity is inescapable doesn’t mean that all scholarly attempts are poisoned from go. In fact, the best way to teach students to overcome their own biases is to teach them to be on the lookout for them. That requires each student to learn how to listen to their own voice – when it announces itself and when it hides. Inviting students to bring their full selves into the writing process goes a long way to teaching them how to recognize, welcome and challenge their own blind spots.
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Voicey writing also challenges the academy’s blind spots. How many students were made to feel that they couldn’t be a scientist or geologist or literary scholar because they don’t want to force themselves to write the way those people write? I once had a Black student ask if she could write an essay in AAVE. I said yes and she turned in a beautiful essay. Not only did she learn that “good academic writing” can sound Black and musical and queer; she learned that AI had nothing to offer her for this assignment. I invited her to speak for herself, on her own terms, in her own voice – which is the one task AI cannot do for any of us.
AI poses an enormous challenge to the future of writing, but I’m not ready to throw in the towel. I’m hopeful that the more students are encouraged to sound like themselves, the less they will ask a computer program to speak on their behalf. Eventually our students might come to look at AI-generated writing the way I look at a lot of journal-worthy academic prose: boring, formulaic, sterile, same-old, blah.
While students deserve blame for cheating and lying, they don’t deserve blame for believing their own voices aren’t good enough for school. That blame lays squarely at teachers’ feet. So much of education is encouraging students to find and challenge and use their unique voices. It’s a tragedy that we ever made them believe those voices deserved to be heard everywhere else in the world but their writing.