I just read a short essay yesterday on “Notes for Young Writers” (Annie Dillard). I don’t see myself as a young writer, but it still gave me a little inspiration/motivation boost, and after all I started this blog partly to practice writing, for self-betterment and enjoyment. Today I started typing this blogpost with no plan or direction, just a self-directive to “force yourself to start writing”. However I won’t pretend that the end written product is a direct brain to screen dump from start to finish - I am confusing myself already with recursive thinking (I wrote “Today” in a revisionary edit a couple of days later… ). My first transcribed thoughts such as “I write these words with no plan in my head … my initial momentum to plough ahead is already fading etc.” have long been edited away in favour of a cohesive overall story.

The problem with having no pre-conceived plan is that writing seems to become an internal power struggle between different internal factions with different goals and priorities. Each wishes to seize control of the narrative, redirect the writing, or to rehash or remove the past paragraph to swing the piece in a different direction. With a set plan, writing can be more like an optimisation problem of how to convey this overall message/story in the best way. Yes there may be some re-writing, but the base story doesn’t change much, e.g. my previous posts have detailed real things that I did.

In my case however, one faction has won out, and the others have bowed down in subservience to the end desire to write a full-course dinner with narrative starter, main and dessert, rather than the dog’s breakfast that I started with. This must be the usual state of affairs in writing - in “Notes for Young Writers”, the author describes setting out to write a piece of fiction, where the first third of the story will necessarily have to be discarded and rewritten. Presumably by the time that the first pass of the whole story is finished, the direction of the whole narrative will have shifted so much from the initial conception that the beginning will be out of place in the wider context.

Reading this essay, detailing the long, hard process of the aspiring writer necessary to hone their craft, I was impressed by the breadth and depth of the listed important writing skills “reread up on grammar at least twice a year”, and a lot of “Don’t do XXX (describe feelings)” etc. statements. If I write more I should surely try to learn some of these rules - I am currently totally freestyle in this sense beyond any that I may have luckily implicitly internalised from my general education. I also wondered that in this new age of GPTs and LLMs, whether the “art”/skill of good writing might be lost to the majority of people.

Since specialising into the math and engineering side of things in high school, my written output has been much curtailed. In early middle school I used to write fiction stories once a week for English class. I vividly remember spending the whole commute back from school fantasizing and planning my short fiction story of the week, excited to think of a fun plot. In later middle school I wrote homework essays analysing aspects of the novel/play we studied in class (English), or arguing for the cause behind a historical episode (History). These tasks I think I found a bit more frustrating and arbitrary - I questioned why did I get a bad mark on this English essay, what exactly could/should I have done better? Presumably using more descriptive/interesting language, spinning a more nuanced analysis etc., yet I still felt that my efforts would be wasted. After all in math and science, I could not but get full marks by deriving the desired answer through a sequence of logically correct implications. I remember the report card of my history teacher (quite fond memories) praising my “idiosyncratic” writing style, but noting that I would still do better to try to conform to the standard / recommended writing structure (paragraphs like: introduction, on one hand, on the other hand, further inspection of important factor, conclusion). I think the narrowing of focus to writing in a particular way, and aiming for high marks had me less motivated and engaged in the whole business. I further stressed out about inorganically learning all the important dates and events in History, and English I almost totally shunned from my mind where possible, so unsure I was as to how the subject was actually meant to be studied and learnt. The end result was that, of all my end of middle school exam marks, English Language and English Literature were the only subjects in which I didn’t get the highest possible grade (A*).

In high school, bachelor’s and master’s, my writing has been irregular and narrow. There have been many speedily typed emails (messy, little to no editing). More polished were the few technical writing endeavours like project reports, theses, academic papers, but the scope and style of writing is very constrained by the technical content. Probably the only standalone “good” writing has been a few highly crafted application or motivation letters, where I get to really passionately proclaim my love for AI (or other area), and a notable piece application essay for a master’s at TUM where you had to write on a scientific topic - I chose Occam’s Razor.

I can only speak and conjecture for myself and those similar to me, but with the advent of LLM’s I imagine that what little good writing we now do will be even further diminished by the fast and easy editing abilities of Chat GPT. An application essay that had used to take 3 hours of drafting, editing and refining can now be done with a quick 15 minute splurge of the key info in bullet point form, for an AI to reformulate in proper style. Writing well is difficult and multifaceted, so if people don’t practice this skill it will surely become even more so - it’s not like riding a bike (easy once learnt). And if it is already hard and tedious, all the more reason to avoid it as much possible by using AI instead. At least we won’t lose all language abilities (though brain computer interfaces may be around another corner), as talking and importantly reading will still be irreplaceable as a means of communicating knowledge. These will definitely assuage our ability to write’s decline, however maybe not enough as I fear these skills are still quite distinct. For instance communicating my meaning by speech feels so fast and easy, whereas writing is much slower and more painful, agonising often over individual words, and jumping forwards and backwards across a passage. That reading and writing are quite different is also clear - a slick paragraph can be read in 20 seconds, though it may take 20 minutes to write and edit. At least the end medium is the same, and there is hope that if you can recognise someone else’s good writing (by reading it), then you will at least know when what you yourself have produced is of good quality. Let’s just hope that positing good written formulations will be much faster than the proverbial monkey on a typewriter trying to write Shakespeare!