MCC Daily Tribune

Composition Cemetery: Myths about Composition Debunked

Myth: The Essay is Dead

According to Reuter’s, ChatGPT reached 100 million users in 2 months and it took five days for them to reach 1 million. In comparison, TikTok took 9 months and Instagram took 2 ½ years to reach that number of users. ChatGPT’s arrival on the scene can and has disrupted writers writing. Has it killed the college essay?

Technology writer Stephen Marche sounds the alarm bell that this invention has a destructive power and states in a recent article for The Atlantic that “Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point…. The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up.” The wily and willful ways that technology creates bypasses for the thinking brain is always churning. How awful. Isn’t it? Is there any way to prevent the slip-slide into chaos that this new technology has created? Is the essay now, officially, dead?

Perhaps, yes. And maybe the original iteration needed to die to be reborn. I wonder if we are doing that thing where we get so caught up in fear of change that we blame the thing itself? Take Plato’s Phaedrus for example. Socrates claims that writing is not an effective way to communicate ideas. Why would one write if communication itself would be clearer when spoken aloud in person? The irony, of course, is that we, today, gain this understanding through its publication in print. Yes, Socrates bemoaned a future where a loss of contextualization of ideas occurs, thus beginning a centuries-old tradition of seeing the next new thing as the next biggest problem. (See Amy Betti’s discussion in this edition of Comp notes to read about the flurry of opinions on the future of AI where she notes how we might we see the ChatGPT as a tool.)

To come back for a moment to the essay itself, let’s consider it as a form. At one time, the 5-paragraph essay was held in high regard and composition faculty employed the use of modes such as narrative, description, comparison/contrast, etc., in discreet, sterile assignments that afforded students practice as writers. While its possibilities include standard formats and scholarly templates, the essay itself is far from a monolith: the essay form has a wide-ranging quality including personal, philosophical, concrete, whimsical, depending on audience and purpose. Today, multimodality has gone even further. Interactive research essays may not only build upon prior tools, but also showcase a variety of images, styles, and formats not typical before the invention of the internet. Assignments such as blog posts with summary and response hyperlinks, voice threads, video scripts, PowerPoint presentations with voice and moving graphics, and group projects using online tools in person and on Zoom have come on the scene to fill out even more options. Writers regularly take part in the process of essay writing in all its shapes and sizes. We can, and do, create and recreate anew.

Yes, these, too, may be co-opted by a future iteration of AI. But writing is and has always been a social activity. This threshold concept in writing studies helps writing teachers and students to navigate the ecology of writing as more than just an essay. Our students want to see themselves as agents of their own voice. How might we create opportunities for them to continue to do so given AI exists?

University of Southern California Professor Marilyn M. Cooper proposes: “In place of the static and limited categories of contextual models, the ecological model postulates dynamic interlocking systems which structure the social activity of writing.” If we open up communication to include the essay and beyond, we can see all the opportunities for teaching writers to read, think, and explore as a creative endeavor, one that adds up to more than just the “final product” of a neat, orderly essay. As Cooper notes, “Writing is one of the activities by which we locate ourselves in the enmeshed systems that make up the social world. It is not simply a way of thinking but more fundamentally a way of acting.” How might we engage students in acting on their own voice and joining conversations with ideas all around them in new and innovative ways? I’m curious for what’s next.