The Answer to Student AI Writing Slop is Authorial Voice

The way they teach you to write in high school is to make your prose sound like everyone else. This isn’t because your English teacher wants to beat all individuality out of you and turn you into the perfect conforming public school subject. Maybe that’s some of them, sure, but most of them instead recognize that to become a good writer you first need to learn to write clearly and with control over your prose, and both are difficult if you’re instead writing with the dramatically oriented style typical of enthusiastic teens.

The idea, like learning to play scales before you improvise, is that this control, and this ear for staid clarity, will give a foundation upon which more fun styles can be built without sliding from good writing to bad. And that makes a lot of sense. Most teens, even enthusiastic young authors, are bad writers. They might have the talent to become good writers (though not all do), but they lack the skill to pull it off. So you start by learning to be prosaic, and once you have that down, you develop an authorial voice.

The trouble comes from the over-application of this approach. If you’re a teen who already writes well (they exist!), then the advice to go bland isn’t a step to making your writing better, but is instead a demand you make your writing worse. Such a teen should push back by demonstrating they’re capable of bland (it’s good to be able to shape your prose to your audience), but once demonstrated, they shouldn’t keep practicing the habits of blandness.

Except every teen who’s enthusiastic about writing thinks they’re a good writer. Even if they’re not. And, given the kind of writing you find in popular books, books it’s likely at least some high school English teachers are reading for pleasure, there’s a chance that enthusiastic teen ends up in a classroom where the teacher can’t really tell the difference.

All of the above is what I was thinking about when I read Steven Mintz’s article about the damage AI has done to undergraduate writing. Particularly this paragraph:

During this fall’s semester, I assigned my undergraduates weekly outside-of-class essays. Many are now interchangeable—uniformly well-organized, articulate, and confident, yet oddly generic and curiously detached from the specific issues we’re discussing in class. Most troubling, several papers made claims about sources we had never examined, complete with plausible-sounding analysis.

ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude write better than most students. They write better than most adults. This isn’t because they write well, but because most people are quite poor writers. LLMs can produce coherent prose, something most people find challenging, especially when writing at length. LLM output is generally well organized, and organization, for most adults (let alone students), is hard. This all makes the urge to use an LLM to help with your writing assignment rather strong. If it writes better than you can, and possibly better than you’ll ever write, why not use it? How’s your teacher going to find out? (The AI detection tools unscrupulous firms sell to schools are snake oil. ) And it’s not like you’ll lose access to these tools when you have to write something in the real world, after graduation, at your job, or in your daily life. Right?

And I get it. I like writing and don’t want a robot to do it for me. But I’m weird. For most people, writing is a chore, and just as I’d love for a robot to do the dishes and clean the house and weed the garden, it’s just a fact of humanity that the bulk of the people I share the planet with wouldn’t mind if they never had to write another essay again.

So my reaction to Mintz’s article, and to that paragraph in particular, isn’t about what everyone should do, but instead the question of what the young people who are good writers, or on their way to becoming good writers, should do about a world where relatively decent prose is available to everyone as a free service.

What I think they should do, and what their parents should encourage, is take advantage of where LLMs are bad: They author prose that is, going back to Mintz, “uniformly well-organized, articulate, and confident, yet oddly generic.” In other words, LLMs write well by the standards of a mid-tier high school English teacher, but they lack authorial voice. Their default output is “oddly generic.” And if you force them—“Write in the style of...”—they’ll come up with prose that is at best a parody of whoever you have in mind.

Thus, I think, the way to stand out in the classroom, or the way to indicate to the teacher or professor that you wrote the paper and not ChatGPT, is to have a voice. One that’s yours, that comes through in your writing, in class and take-home, but also in your speech. You should have an expressive fingerprint, and it should be clear in whatever you express.

Yes, this means, as I said, pushing back on the “write bland” feedback. If you’re a good writer. It means showing off who you are a little earlier than we encourage young writers to do. It means playing more, and teachers having more tolerance for that play. The control still matters. So does the clarity. But those can come alongside cultivating a voice. Students should make the effort to sound distinct from the bots. And teachers should make the effort to help them achieve that.