#professions

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Writing vs AI

I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER on Jan 22 at The Tattered Cover<, and in COLORADO SPRINGS from Jan 23–25 where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on Jan 28 at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.

I come from a family of teachers – both parents taught all their lives and now oversee Ed.D candidates, brother owns a school – which has left me painfully aware of the fact that I am not a great teacher.

I am, however, a good teacher. The difference is that a good teacher can teach students who want to learn, whereas a great teacher can inspire students to want to learn. I've spent most of my life teaching, here and there, and while I'm not great, I am getting better.

Last year, I started a new teaching gig: I'm one of Cornell's AD White Visiting Professors, meaning that I visit Cornell (and its NYC campus, Cornell Tech) every year or two for six years and teach, lecture, meet, and run activities.

When I was in Ithaca in September for my inaugural stint, I had a string of what can only be called "peak experiences," meeting with researchers, teachers, undergrads, grads and community members. I had so many conversations that will stick with me, and today I want to talk about one of them.

It was a faculty discussion, and one of the people at the table had been involved in a research project to investigate students' attitudes to their education. The research concluded that students come to Cornell to learn – because they love knowledge and critical thinking – but they are so haunted by the financial consequences of failure (wasting tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars repeating a year or failing out altogether, and then entering the job market debt-burdened and degree-less) that they feel pressured not to take intellectual risks, and, at worst, to cheat. They care about learning, but they're afraid of bad grades, and so chasing grades triumphs over learning.

At that same discussion, I met someone who taught Cornell's version of freshman comp, the "here's how to write at a college level" course that every university offers. I've actually guest-taught some of these, starting in 2005/6, when I had a Fulbright Chair at USC.

Now, while I'm not a great teacher, I am a pretty good writing teacher. I was lucky enough to be mentored by Judith Merril (starting at the age of 9!), who taught me how to participate in a peer-based writing workshop:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#neofuturians

In high school, I met Harriet Wolff, a gifted writing teacher, whose writing workshop (which Judith Merril had actually founded, decades earlier) was so good that I spent seven years in my four-year high-school, mostly just to keep going to Harriet's workshop:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/30/merely-clever/#rip-harriet-wolff

I graduated from the Clarion science fiction and fantasy workshop (where Judith Merril learned to workshop) in 1992, and then went on to teach Clarion and Clarion West on several occasions, as well as other workshops in the field, such as Viable Paradise (today, I volunteer for Clarion's board). I have taught and been taught, and I've learned a thing or two.

Here's the thing about every successful writing workshop I've been in: they don't necessarily make writing enjoyable (indeed, they can be painful), but they make it profoundly satisfying. When you repeatedly sit down with the same writers, week after week, to think about what went wrong with their work, and how they can fix it, and to hear the same about your work, something changes in how you relate to your work. You come to understand how to transform big, inchoate ideas into structured narratives and arguments, sure – but you also learn to recognize when the structure that emerges teaches you something about those big, inchoate ideas that was there all along, but not visible to you.

It's revelatory. It teaches you what you know. It lets you know what you know. It lets you know more than you know. It's alchemical. It creates new knowledge, and dispels superstition. It sharpens how you think. It sharpens how you talk. And obviously, it sharpens how you write.

The freshmen comp students I've taught over the years were amazed (or, more honestly, incredulous) when I told them this, because for them, writing was a totally pointless exercise. Well, almost totally pointless. Writing had one point: to get a passing grade so that the student could advance to other subjects.

I'm not surprised by this, nor do I think it's merely because some of us are born to write and others will never get the knack (I've taught too many writers to think that anyone can guess who will find meaning in writing). It's because we don't generally teach writing this way until the most senior levels – the last year or two of undergrad, or, more likely, grad school (and then only if that grad program is an MFA).

Writing instruction at lower levels, particularly in US high schools, is organized around standardized assessment. Students are trained to turn out the world's worst literary form: the five-paragraph essay:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3749

The five-paragraph essay is so rigid that any attempt to enliven it is actually punished during the grading process. One cannot deviate from the structure, on penalty of academic censure. It's got all the structural constraints of a sonnet, and all the poetry of a car crusher.

The five-paragraph essay is so terrible that a large part of the job of a freshman comp teacher is to teach students to stop writing them. But even after this is done, much of the freshman comp curriculum is also formulaic (albeit with additional flexibility). That's unavoidable: freshman comp classes are typically massive, since so many of the incoming students have to take it. When you're assessing 100-2,000 students, you necessarily fall back on formula.

Which brings me back to that faculty discussion at Cornell, where we learned first that students want to learn, but are afraid of failure; and then heard from the freshman comp teacher, who told us that virtually all of their students cheated on their assignments, getting chatbots to shit out their papers.

And that's what I've been thinking about since September. Because of course those students cheat on their writing assignments – they are being taught to hit mechanical marks with their writing, improving their sentence structure, spelling and punctuation. What they're not learning is how to use writing to order and hone their thoughts, or to improve their ability to express those thoughts. They're being asked to write like a chatbot – why wouldn't they use a chatbot?

You can't teach students to write – not merely to create formally correct sentences, but to write – through formal, easily graded assignments. Teaching writing is a relational practice. It requires that students interact extensively with one another's work, and with one another's criticism. It requires structure, sure – but the structure is in how you proceed through the critiques and subsequent discussion – not in the work itself.

This is the kind of thing you do in small seminars, not big lecture halls. It requires that each student produce a steady stream of work for critique – multiple pieces per term or semester – and that each student closely read and discuss every other student's every composition. It's an intense experience that pushes students to think critically about critical thought itself. It's hard work that requires close supervision and it only works in small groups.

Now, common sense will tell you that this is an impractical way to run a freshman comp class that thousands of students have to take. Not every school can be Yale, whose Daily Themes writing course is the most expensive program to deliver with one instructor for every two students:

https://admissions.yale.edu/bulldogs-blogs/logan/2020/03/01/daily-themes

But think back to the two statements that started me down this line of thinking:

1) Most students want to learn, but are afraid of the financial ruin that academic failure will entail and so they play things very safe; and

2) Virtually all freshman comp students use AI to cheat on their assignments.

By the time we put our students in writing programs that you can't cheat on, and where you wouldn't want to cheat, they've had years of being taught to write like an LLM, but with the insistence that they not use an LLM. No wonder they're cheating! If you wanted to train a graduating class to cheat rather than learn, this is how you'd do it.

Teaching freshman comp as a grammar/sentence structure tutorial misses the point. Sure, student writing is going to be bad at first. It'll be incoherent. It'll be riddled with errors. Reading student work is, for the most part, no fun. But for students, reading other students' writing, and thinking about what's wrong with it and how to fix it is the most reliable way to improve their own work (the dirty secret of writing workshops is that other writers' analysis of your work is generally less useful to you than the critical skills you learn by trying to fix their work).

The amazing thing about bad writing is that it's easy to improve. It's much easier than finding ways to improve the work of a fluid, experienced writer. A beginning writer who makes a lot of easily spotted mistakes is a beginning writer who's making a lot of easily fixed mistakes. That means that the other writers around the circle are capable of spotting those errors, even if they're just starting out themselves. It also means that the writer whose work is under discussion will be able to make huge improvements through simple changes. Beginning writers can get a lot of momentum going this way, deriving real satisfaction from constant, visible progress.

Replacing freshman comp with dozens of small groups run like graduate seminars is expensive and hard to imagine. But it would create a generation of students who wouldn't use an AI to write their essays any more than they'd ask an AI to eat a delicious pizza for them. We should aspire to assign the kinds of essays that change the lives of the students who write them, and to teach students to write that kind of essay.

Freshman comp was always a machine for turning out reliable sentence-makers, not an atelier that trained reliable sense-makers. But AI changes the dynamic. Today, students are asking chatbots to write their essays for the same reason that corporations are asking chatbots to do their customer service (because they don't give a shit):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice

I'm not saying that small writing workshops of the sort that changed my life will work for everyone. But I am saying that teaching writing in huge lecture halls with assignments optimized for grading works for no one.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/07/delicious-pizza/#hold-the-gravel

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[elumish]

One thing I don't see show up as a consideration in worldbuilding a lot is what things are professionalized.

By that I mean how (and whether) certain activities or focuses are conducted in an organized, professional manner or treated as a career path or industry (often with set standards or training involved) rather than those that are treated primarily as hobbies or conducted in an ad hoc manner.

Standing armies, for example, are professionalized in a way that temporary armies or militias aren't. Being in the military is a profession that is organized and has specific standards and training and that clearly distinguishes between people who are or are not in the military. If we look at a lot of past wars, though, as well as many militias, being in the military was not a career for most people (especially most enlisted) and the time and effort between deciding to join and being on a battlefield was significantly smaller.

A professionalized military will generally be a stronger, more cohesive, more effective military--but it is also far more expensive to maintain, because as it is a profession the military servicemembers pull their salary from the military on a regular basis, and it takes away hands from other tasks such as manufacturing and farming.

Over the last few hundred years a lot of countries have seen (to varying degrees) professionalization of fields like firefighting, policing, pharmacology, emergency response, and search and rescue. In these cases, it reflects 1) a recognized need for a standing trained force that can respond quickly; 2) a recognized need for standards and credentialing; 3) the ability societally to have individuals who might otherwise be contributing to manufacturing or food production not do that indefinitely; 4) a dedicated ongoing effort to maintain standards, trainings, etc.; and 5) organizations (generally governments) that can pay for these services.

We also see the professionalization of other things, like youth sports--the push to treat youth sports as either primarily a system to develop professional athletes or a career on its own.

When you're doing worldbuilding, consider what roles would be treated in this professionalized manner, rather than those that would be viewed as temporary positions or conducted on an ad hoc basis.

Is there a standing professional military? How does the professionalization differ between officers and enlisted?

Is emergency preparedness, response, or recovery a professionalized field? Is the focus of that profession on planning? On search and rescue, triage, or other immediate response activities or coordination? On rebuilding following disasters? On managing grants, tax relief, or other monetary aspects of rebuilding?

Is pharmacology a regulated industry that requires training or credentialing? Is medicine?

Is firefighting generally conducted by individuals in the neighborhood? By private industry? By unpaid volunteers managed by a governmental or non-governmental organization? By full-time paid staff?

Are these positions generally a full-time job or an ad hoc/as needed job that can be called on? If it is an ad hoc position, what are the credentialing requirements to be put on the roster?

[dallysblinkies]

job/labels oc stamps!!

my ocs have a wide variety of jobs/labels... pls enjoy ^_^

theres a lot here... anyway! just reblog to use! love u guys <3

[nemfrog]

A sculptor carefully measures the dimensions of a plaster or clay model of a planned sculpture. Istruzione elementare per gli studiosi della scultura. Elementary Instruction for Students of Sculpture. 1802.

Later he will transfer the measurements to a block of stone that he will transform into the intended sculpture.

Internet Archive

[literaryvein-reblogs]

concepts related to different professions

Businessperson

abettor, adjutant, adviser/advisor, aid/aide, announcer, apprentice, archaeologist, assistant, auditor, authority, baker, barber, broker, businessperson, buyer, caretaker, cartoonist, chair, chef, client, colleague, conservator, consumer, correspondent, court, creator, curator, customer, dabbler, desk jockey, developer, drudge, employee, envoy, espionage, explorer, fellow, flier, flyer, fortuneteller, freshman, go-between, gourmet, guard, guru, hacker, hand, hawker, helper, hooker, inferior, informant or informer, inspector, interviewer, investigator, janitor, labor, liaison, messenger, moderator, monitor, navigator, newsman/woman, page, patron, picket, pioneer, poet, practitioner, prodigal, protégé, referee, representative, reviewer, rival, sailor, scout, seaman/woman, seller, shopper, speaker, spokesperson, spy, subordinate, tailor, traveler, virtuoso, wayfarer, writer

Educator

academic, adviser/advisor, alumnus/alumna, coach, conductor, disciplinarian, faculty, freshman, graduate, intellectual, learner, martinet, mastermind, monitor, practitioner, professor, rookie, savant, school, swami, trainer

Entertainer

acrobat, actress, aficionado, ballet dancer, character, comic, creator, director, fan, groupie, hero/heroine, humorist, inventor, luminary, magician, name, participant, personage/personality, player, protagonist, star, troubadour, virtuoso, zany

Financier

accountant, bean counter, broker, investor, spendthrift

Government officer

administrator, ambassador, authoritarian, autocracy, bureaucrat, consul, delegate, despot, diplomat, emir, empress, establishment, exile, fascist, figurehead, front runner, informant/informer, intermediary, leader, liaison, magistrate, master, mogul, mouthpiece, officer, oppressor, pacifist, patrol, personage/personality, police/police officer, prime minister, representative, snitch, spokesperson, tyrant, weasel

Legal practitioner

attorney, beneficiary, counsel, heir, judge, lawyer, officer, proponent, witness

Media person

commentator, journalist, newsman/woman, reporter, writer

Medical practitioner

analyst, druggist, nurse, patient, physician, researcher, therapist

Military person

combatant, conqueror, fighter, gladiator, lookout, militant, patrol, recruit, scout, seaman/woman, truant, warmonger, warrior

Politician

advocate, anarchist, apostle, arbitrator, conservative, dissident, extremist, firebrand, idealist, militant, mouthpiece, nonconformist, patron, picket, proponent, reactionary, sectarian

Religious person

acolyte, angel, atheist, chaplain, conformist, creator, deacon, doubter, dreamer, evangelism, father, genie, inventor, loner, minister, monk, pagan, pastor, priest, saint, skeptic, visionary, witch, wizard

NOTE

The above are concepts classified according to subject and usage. It not only helps writers and thinkers to organize their ideas but leads them from those very ideas to the words that can best express them.

It was, in part, created to turn an idea into a specific word. By linking together the main entries that share similar concepts, the index makes possible creative semantic connections between words in our language, stimulating thought and broadening vocabulary.

Source ⚜ Writing Basics & Refreshers ⚜ On Vocabulary

[us-politics]

This is where the Kirk family lived while discouraging women from education and professional careers.

[the-august-one]

Is Bugs Bunny a famous cowboy?

Yes.

No.

Nuanced in some way that doesn't at help OP settle a bet.

Voting ended onDec 31, 2024