Learning to Love Awkward Prose

The mistakes AI can't make are the endearing heart of writing

A couple of funny things have happened in the age of ChatGPT’s infiltration of the hallowed halls of academia. The first funny thing is that, despite statistics to the contrary, the invasion has been in my experience overhyped—less of a D-Day and more a series of unsuccessful forays into territory firmly held by an old guard who still know what plagiarism is and have an arsenal to combat it. Many students may have experimented with AI, but few appear to be habitual users. (Could it be that they’ve discovered that trying to wrangle AI into doing what they need it to do—for my papers, anyway—is harder than just doing the work yourself? The old “it was harder to cheat on this test than just studying would have been” paradigm? Unknown.)

The second funny thing, however, is more important. In the age of AI, with its crisp cadence and prose sterilized of all grammatical missteps, I find myself reading student papers with a growing appreciation for all things awkward. Students often write poorly. It’s true. They learn to write better as they write more, but they often still write in stilted sentences or florid run-ons that lose the thread midway between the third and fourth comma. They phrase things uncomfortably, putting carts before horses and objects before subjects and verbs barely hanging on in the middle of gerund clauses. They very frequently choose the wrong word, whether it be the word that sounded like the word the meant or the word that means almost what they wanted to say. Even more often, they choose vague or unspecific words, “things” and “people” and “problems.” They tack on colloquialisms and conversational phrases that don’t work well in written English, and then make grandiose gestures of academic tone in the next clause.

I’ve come to love it.

In Ted Chiang’s piece Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art, he asserts that art is the result of many choices. Each brushstroke, color, blend, shadow of a painting is the result of a deliberate choice, or at the least the default of a personally entrenched practice, by a human artist, and it’s in those choices that art is rendered. Same goes for written work—each word, comma, space, clause is a choice, intentionally wrought (and sometimes fraught). Chiang discusses art, made by, in the way he describes the process, people who know what they’re doing. You get art when competent people apply choice to a medium.

But my student’s missteps and errors, unintentional tongue twisters and funky format—those are all choices, too. Fumbling choices, sure, often choices rooted in misunderstandings or a lack of formal training. It’s a key element to remember, one that frustrated students who hear the siren call of a grammatically correct paragraph from ChatGPT and their frustrated professors tired of marking comma splices should pay attention to. Students who make choices make mistakes—and students who make mistakes have made choices. Most of the element of choice is stripped away if a prose generator is used, and the lack of mistakes is in fact a symptom of a lack of choice.

Students may not be making high art when they cobble together sentence fragments and misaligned word choices, but they’re making something unique to them. No one else could have written the paragraph they wrote; no one else had quite the same series of ideas and no one else tried to splice those ideas together with a pastiche of commas and conjunctions. Maybe it isn’t beautiful, but I kind of love it anyway.

Some of those students will keep writing, beyond their required Gen Ed courses and even beyond college. Some of them are already weaving words in their spare time; some will rediscover writing at some unknown future point in life, where maybe they feel lost or found or maybe they just itch to say something. And for the ones who keep writing, the process will continue, and the writing smooth into less awkward and more personally resonant forms, and the part we can call art will keep unfolding. Because that’s part of the “choice” involved in art, too—it isn’t only the choice involved in making *that particular piece* but in the pattens and style developed in making millions of choices in every piece that came before.

And some students will gladly leave creating extensive written work behind, by and large, as soon as possible, and that’s all right, too. The experience of communicating ideas through choices—and honing ideas by trying to communicate them—will, I hope,

stick with them. Will rewire some part of their brain, will make them more attuned even if they’re not aware of it to the value in art and choice made by others, will prompt them toward deeper and more critical thought. That is, after all, the point of an education.

Those awkward comma splices and misused words in student papers? Those are the first tentative steps toward art. They’re the evidence of thought and engagement and real, actual learning. They’re choices. Wrong ones, objectively. But they’re choices nonetheless.