The writing professor isn't wrong — just asking the right question
The debate about AI and English composition isn't really about AI. It's about what we think writing is for.
Last week I had a conversation with an English writing professor that I can't stop thinking about. When I argued that universities need to teach students how to work effectively with AI, she pushed back with a question that cut right to the heart of it: "How am I supposed to teach writing if students are letting AI write everything for them?"
My first instinct was to defend the position. But the more I sat with her question, the more I realized she wasn't being resistant. She was being precise. And her precision exposed something that most AI-in-education advocates, myself included, tend to gloss over.
"The problem isn't that AI is writing for students. The problem is that we haven't updated our definition of what writing is for."
Writing was never just about producing text
When we teach writing, we say we're teaching communication. But we're actually teaching something harder: the discipline of thinking through a problem until you have something true to say about it. The blank page is not an obstacle. It is the instrument. The hard work of finding words — the wrestling, the false starts, the crossing out — is how the mind finds what it actually means.
If a student hands that struggle entirely to an AI, they haven't written anything — they've commissioned something. And the professor's instinct is correct: there's nothing left to teach, because the cognitive work the course was designed to build never happened.
But here's where the argument gets interesting. The same is true of a student who uses a thesaurus without knowing what they mean, who runs grammar-check without understanding why a sentence failed, or who asks a friend to "clean up" a draft before submission. The tool isn't the problem. The absence of engagement is.
The new skill isn't prompting. It's judgment.
There's a version of "AI literacy" that is essentially vocational: learn to write better prompts, use the right model for the right task, format your outputs efficiently. That version is genuinely useful and genuinely teachable. But it's not what an English writing course should become, and it's not what I mean when I say we need to teach students to work effectively with AI.
What I mean is this: the moment a student reads an AI-generated paragraph and decides whether it's good, they are doing writing. They are exercising taste, judgment, and the same critical faculty that the course was always trying to build. The question is whether we design courses that make that moment visible and rigorous — or whether we let it happen invisibly, with no instruction and no accountability.
"A student who can tell you precisely why an AI draft is wrong has learned more about writing than one who produces a competent essay without understanding it."
What this actually looks like in a writing class
The writing professor I spoke with is not the problem. She is, in fact, perfectly positioned to lead this work — because her subject is the one that most directly confronts the question AI raises: what does it mean to have something to say?
Concretely, this might look like a course that asks students to generate an AI draft on a topic, then write a one-page critique of its reasoning. It might ask them to revise an AI paragraph until it sounds like them — and then explain what they changed and why. It might ask them to identify the three moments in a piece where the AI made a choice, and argue whether each choice was right.
These are not AI exercises. They are writing exercises. They develop the exact muscles that writing courses have always targeted — the ability to read critically, to recognize the difference between language that sounds right and thinking that is right, and to make deliberate choices on the page.
The university that refuses to engage will lose the argument
There is a version of this story where universities hold the line — where AI is prohibited, work is produced by hand, and the skills we care about are preserved in amber. I understand the instinct. But that version has already lost. Students are using AI in every course, in every context, with or without permission. The question is not whether they use it. The question is whether they learn anything while doing so.
The universities that will matter in ten years are the ones that treat AI as a new form of literacy — not a shortcut to be banned or a tool to be celebrated, but a medium that requires the same critical intelligence we have always asked of educated people. And the professors best equipped to teach that intelligence are not the ones in computer science departments. They are the ones who have spent their careers asking students to mean what they say.
The English writing professor isn't asking the wrong question. She's asking the only question that matters. We just need to answer it together.
This post is part of an ongoing series on AI in higher education. If you're a faculty member rethinking your course design in the age of AI, explore the resources at attentoai.com.