AI for teaching writing; Elon’s Kamala risks; crappy books in bookstores: Newsletter 30 October 2024

Newsletter 68. Banning student AI is stupid. Plus, how print-on-demand books get on shelves, the spreadsheet blooper reel, why Elon Musk loves Trump, three people to follow, three books to read, and my interview with Jane Friedman.

A five-paragraph essay reveals how to revolutionize the teaching of writing

It’s time to retire the venerable five-paragraph essay and other formulaic writing exercises. We must replace it with assignments that allow students a chance to fully explore what they can do with words — including with AI help.

I asked ChatGPT to create a five-paragraph essay on why the five-paragraph essay is a poor way to teach writing. It made some pretty good points. Here’s what it wrote:

The five-paragraph essay is widely used in teaching writing, but it has significant limitations that can hinder students’ development as effective communicators. By emphasizing structure over substance, this format encourages formulaic responses rather than authentic engagement with ideas. Instead of fostering critical thinking, it often leads students to focus on “filling in the blanks” of an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion, which can stifle creativity and discourage deeper exploration.

One major flaw of the five-paragraph essay is its rigid structure, which can oversimplify complex arguments. Real-world writing often requires flexibility to address different audiences and purposes, but the five-paragraph model teaches students to follow a uniform structure regardless of context. This approach can hinder their ability to write persuasive arguments or nuanced analysis, as they are trained to present ideas within a confining template, rather than developing a more organic, thought-driven approach to organization.

Additionally, the five-paragraph essay limits students’ ability to develop their thoughts fully. Because this format constrains them to three supporting points, it discourages deeper exploration and often leads to shallow analysis. In contrast, more open-ended writing assignments allow students to pursue ideas at greater length and follow their reasoning wherever it leads, fostering critical thinking and creativity. The five-paragraph format can be restrictive and, as a result, dulls students’ ability to think critically.

Another issue is that the five-paragraph essay creates an artificial separation between form and content. In focusing on meeting the structural requirements, students may neglect the quality and coherence of their ideas. This disconnect can be counterproductive, as strong writing is about effectively communicating ideas, not merely adhering to a template. Teaching writing with an overemphasis on format risks reducing writing to a mechanical task, rather than one of expressing thoughtful insights.

In conclusion, while the five-paragraph essay may be easy to teach and grade, it ultimately does a disservice to students’ development as writers. By restricting their creativity, oversimplifying complex ideas, and divorcing form from content, this approach fails to equip students with the skills they need to write effectively. Teaching methods that encourage critical thinking, depth, and flexibility are more likely to produce confident, thoughtful writers prepared for the complexities of real-world communication.

Although that’s hardly the most creative way to explain things, ChatGPT is right about a lot here. The emphasis on form over structure is inflexible and destructive. It closes imaginations down instead of opening them up. As ChatGPT wisely states (or, since it’s just plundering and regurgitating other people’s writing, restates), “Teaching writing with an overemphasis on format risks reducing writing to a mechanical task, rather than one of expressing thoughtful insights.”

We reduced students to performing writing as a machine-like task, just to make grading easier. Is it any surprise that machines can do that task nearly as well as humans?

As a result, the temptation for students to turn in AI-written essays is far too great. The task is tedious, the job of machines is replace tedious work, and the machines are well-suited to it. In the real world, any writer faced with this task would use an LLM to help. So students do, too. Now writing teachers are forced to become AI police, and students who used AI to help them are forced to sue school districts.

As writing professor Martha Nichols told me, “It reinforces our worst impulses, rather than the things that make wonderful writing sing and come off the page.”

Start over. New writers learning now arrive pickled in an immersive stew of social media and text messages and are adept at using technology tools, including writing tools. We don’t require them to pen essays in cursive or eschew spell-checking. They know LLMs exist, and they’ve probably gotten better than you at figuring out how to make them spit out useful text.

What we teach now should have two goals. First, stimulate their imaginations. And second, enable them to learn to use the tools wisely.

Why not ask the student to write an account of an emotional experience they had, ask an AI do the same, and comment on what’s different between their writing and the machine’s?

Why not ask an LLM to summarize it a short paper on history, and then ask a student to review the paper and identify what important points the LLM is missing in its summary?

Why not create a writing assignment designed for AI — say, write a persuasive essay for the school paper on why school should start later in the day — and score students on whose prompts were most creative and generated the best results?

Or assign an AI-written essay and task students to find five factual errors in it?

Take a long passage. Ask an LLM to shorten it to two paragraphs. To one paragraph. To one sentence. To five words. What did it leave out? Can you do a better job?

Banning AI in writing is as shortsighted as banning the web for research. Learning the tools is as important as practicing the skills.

True, these assignments will require more time and effort from teachers. But they have AI tools to help as well. Pour all the students’ assignments into an LLM and extract the most common ideas — and those ones that stand out as the most unusual. Identify which essays sound most like an AI wrote them, and why. Find ten interesting but uncommon vocabulary words that some students used in their writing. AI can help with all of that.

AI is about to revolutionize all creative work. Teachers and students who don’t embrace it will be left behind. Time to change the assignments, the rules, and the ultimate goals.

We have to think a lot harder about this, because the machines are doing the easy thinking already.

News for writers and others who think

Publishers are sending low-quality print-on-demand paperbacks to bookstores when print runs go out of stock (LitHub), undermining one of the few advantages bookstores have over online sellers.

Companies that think strategically identify what’s about to change and prepare for it. Nations should do the same thing. This essay by Nobel-prize winning economist Daron Acemoglu in The New York Times (gift link) argues that the U.S. is failing to do that for three huge trends: an aging population, the rise of AI, and the evolution of globalization.

Dan Price, the CEO who raised all his employees’ salaries to $70K and reduced his own, became famous for proselytizing a new way to do business. According to the Seattle Times, “As CEO, Price cultivated a sense of fear and built a company that, as one former employee put it, was ‘just there to get Dan famous.’ ” Now he’s accused of raping an unconscious woman. No matter your politics, you may find that many of your idols have feet of clay.

Spreadsheets are easy. Spreadsheets are powerful. Spreadsheets are integrated into many of our workflows. And as a result, spreadsheet errors are causing major real-world messes (Ars Technica). The spreadsheet blooper list (The Guardian) includes misleading numbers that influenced economic policy, accounting errors worth more than $1 billion, mistakes that led to tapping the wrong phones, Coronavirus testing errors, and a $6 billion investment loss at JP Morgan.

Why is Elon Musk such a fan of Donald Trump? As Robert Reich writes, under a Harris administration, he could end up prosecuted for election violations for his voter registration sweepstakes giveaway, for illegally coordinating his superPAC with Trump’s campaign, for meeting with Vladimir Putin despite his role as a national security contractor for SpaceX and Starlink, and for turning a blind eye to Russian election disinformation on X. And I can’t figure out how he could possibly end up in a proposed government role in charge of efficiency while still running the large private companies he controls, many of which get lots of government money. When you’re the richest man in the world, these sorts of things might become a problem unless you’ve helped get the right person elected.

Three people to follow

Tom Cunniff , wise B2B marketing consultant and former J. Peterman catalog writer.

Rob Biesenbach , storytelling and public speaking coach for leaders.

Sarah Green Carmichael , ex Harvard Business Review editor and current editor of Bloomberg Opinion.

Three books to read

More Than Words: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner (Basic Books, 2025). Warner is our leading thinker on the teaching of writing. This book likely will include solutions to the problem I outlined in my essay.

Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact by Liz Wiseman (Harper Business, 2021). Instructions on how to be the go-to person for solving big, hairy problems in your business.

The Authentic Leader: The Power of Deep Leadership in Work and Life by Bob Batchelor, PhD (Tudor City, 2024). The acclaimed serial biographer reveals what he has learned about leadership.

My Hot Sheet interview on business book ROI

Publishing’s top pundit, Jane Friedman , interviewed me about the Business Book ROI Study. She asked some pretty smart questions. Read the interview here. (And if you like her insights, subscribe to her every-other-week newsletter The Hot Sheet, it’s essential you’re in a book-related business.)