Teaching Writing in the Age of A.I.

In Defense of Rhetoric

Hua Hsu’s June 2025 article in The New Yorker asks, “What happens after A.I. destroys college writing?” The article addresses the issue that literature and writing instructors have faced over the past three years: the college essay is in decline. At stake is more than the just college essay. It’s the disappearance of one of the most enduring competencies to be earned from higher education, the ability to think and to communicate humanely and eloquently within the parameters of one’s language.

According to a survey conducted by the Digital Education Council, 86% of students use AI to complete their studies at university. And that was in 2024. More recent surveys across the US and the UK reveal a greater reliance upon AI by students. But writing instructors who teach writing don’t need statistics to prove that. We already know it’s happening.

Students aren’t getting away with it because AI writing is so great. Almost anyone can identify it — and I’m not talking about the em-dash. It’s the soulless, unfounded guff, the “profound” platitudes, the repetitious parallelisms, and the “rich tapestries” of bunk that students try to pass as their introductions, conclusions, and, sometimes, entire papers.

Students are getting away with it because, on one hand, university writing instructors are often too overworked and underpaid to inquiry every suspected user, and, on the other hand, universities don’t have sufficient measures to hold students accountable.

But college writing isn’t dead yet. Its demise has revealed the insufficiencies of our current model of teaching composition. The crisis is an invitation to reconsider the values that have informed our teaching of college writing.

The real problem is not AI but something much deeper. For the past 50 years, higher education has been remodeled around efficiency and customer [i.e. student] satisfaction. If English departments and university writing centers don’t alter how they teach writing, they will soon become irrelevant. And the world will be worse for it.¹ Needed now are not punitive measures but preventive ones.

Universities now must recover the value of slow thinking, recursive writing, and the art of communication, and delivery and persuasion. They must return to the teaching of rhetoric.

Composition Vs. Rhetoric

Generally speaking, composition teaches students how to write papers for college. Rhetoric prepares students to write for the civic and moral life of a society. In composition, students’ peers are their classmates, usually trying to satisfy a writing requirement. In a rhetoric course, their peers include a community of great writers who came before them and from whom they learn: Cicero, William Shakespeare, Frederick Douglass, and Virginia Woolf. They study examples of great writing and oratory from the Bible, the ancient Greeks, the Roman senators, and the great essayists and orators in the English language. Composition teaches students how to write a five-paragraph essay. But rhetoric prepares students to write college papers and to compose a eulogy for their grandfather, to write a best man’s speech at a wedding, to address their local school board, to persuade a group of shareholders at a corporate job, and to address citizens of a nation.

As someone who has taught for one of the last rhetoric courses offered at Harvard, I have seen an enormous difference between student writing from composition courses and those from rhetoric courses. Like composition, rhetoric will encourage students to write honestly, to avoid obfuscation and jargon, to leverage tone and balance, to gracefully arrange and order thoughts with syntactical balance, and to establish genuine rapport with the reader. But rhetoric also teaches how clarity and style are not merely intellectual constructs but involve moral, emotional, and aesthetic experiences, too. Rhetoric teaches how a good writer is not so much led by technical skill as by an instinct, an instinct tutored by the study of the best writers.

But why did rhetoric disappear from the college curriculum? It was slowly purged from American universities over the past 60 years as priorities shifted. Tuition was hiked and the humanities were demoted in favor of more lucrative programs. Writing courses reduced their focus to teaching technical skills. This reduction aligned with a broader educational trend toward standardized evaluation, which favored measurable outcomes like grammatical accuracy, structural clarity, and rubric-based scoring rather than rhetorical depth or aesthetic sensibility, which resist quantification.

Five Reasons to Return to Rhetoric

The first reason is that, in studying rhetoric, students learn directly from the great writers. Rhetoric is a tradition that goes all the way back to its classical roots. While university composition courses tend to provide examples from “A” papers or academic writing, a modern course on rhetoric would include selections from Aristotle, Cicero, William Shakespeare, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Virginia Woolf, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion. In a rhetoric course, students would be engaging with and learning from the great writers. And why not? This has always seemed like a missed opportunity to me.

Secondly, teaching rhetoric involves teaching students how to think. It summons the faculties of a whole person. Sometimes people assume that the human brain is always thinking in the way that a refrigerator is always running. But it’s not. It is often taking in and responding to stimuli from the senses, but it is not always thinking. Thinking is a special creative and critical act. Careful thinking must be trained, must be practiced. Composition courses usually focus on argumentation developed under a larger thesis, which appeals largely to logic. But with rhetoric, a student often learns first the three main kinds of appeal—not just the logical, but the ethical and emotional kinds, too.

Thirdly, rhetoric is both critical and creative. It often engages students’ own interests and beliefs by asking them to respond to issues of their own times. Instead of assigning quantitative assignments like ten-page papers, the rhetorician can assign something more qualitative. Students could deliver a 3-minute speech on a pressing civic concern, such as climate change, voting rights, and public health. They must persuade a skeptical audience, using rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, logos) under time constraints. This also exercises quick reasoning and creativity. There are also more playful ways to do this like asking students to select a historical speech (e.g., Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address or Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?”) and to recast it for a modern audience and issue. Grade students partly upon how much they improve over a semester.

Additionally, there is a uniquely creative element to practicing rhetoric. Any rhetoric course could easily split each meeting evenly between lecture and individual or collaborative in-class exercises. Drawing on the readings and lecture material, students are invited to craft, say, a short satirical piece in imitation of Alexander Pope addressing a contemporary absurdity. This engages what Schiller called the “play drive” and enlists creativity into the service of composition. Imitation was a large part of rhetoric for centuries. Benjamin Franklin learned to write by copying out The Spectator essays. Imitations can easily be built into a series of in-class handwritten exercises, in which students put the art of analysis, imitation, and composition into practice.

And lastly, rhetoric furnishes students with the tools and formula of good writing. The daunting blank page is often what sends students to AI tools. But rhetoric provides a list of “common topics,” formulae for beginning an essay and developing its content. (E.g., there is the topic of comparison, in which two or more things are compared in similarity, difference, or by degree; the topic of relationship, by which an idea is considered through cause and effect, contraries, or contradictions; and the topic of testimony, in which statistics are used or authorities are quoted.) There is the study of tropes and schemes, like the antimetabole, the repetition of words in reverse order (e.g., Molière’s “One should eat to live, not live to eat.”). The in-class midterms and finals could require students to apply a certain number of these schemes and tropes. And they would be graded not by length but by quality of argumentation.

The return to rhetoric would help recover what has been lost in higher education over the past 50 years. Some places never gave it up. The institutions who did could learn from what others have held onto. Rhetoric is not the mastery of technical skill alone but the formation of the entire imagination. This formation is partly what a return to rhetoric would offer.

1. That an over-reliance upon AI is harmful to society is a fact both obvious to the sensible and (recently) proven. The recent MIT study on the consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing has shown that writers who use LLMs to write their essays exhibited lower brain connectivity than people who wrote their essays on their own. Not only was there less brain activity, but the LLM-users were less likely to remember what content they had written or even to recall what their essays had said. The long-term consequences affected users on neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.