Why Do Humans Write?

Writing allows us to convey meaning over time and space, making it possible to preserve our experiences and to communicate with faraway readers. When we write, we use a shared set of symbols to record our ideas or messages and transmit them to readers on paper or via a computer. This sounds simple, doesn’t it? And yet, reading and writing are complex cognitive processes that take years to learn. Writing, in particular, is a task that requires difficult mental work. As writers, we continually make difficult decisions about what to include or exclude in our writing, how to organize our thoughts into patterns recognizable to our readers, and how to change the world (even in very small ways) with our written words.

If you find writing difficult, don’t worry; you are not alone. Even as I write these words for a textbook about writing, I’m suffering. I’m thinking about what I should put in this introduction, how I can make this writing about writing interesting for my audience, and what I should make for supper. I get up from my desk to pace around the room, thinking about what should come next or if my writing makes sense for what I’m trying to convey. At the end of a day of writing, I’m physically tired. Writing, I can assure you, is hard work.

Nevertheless, the hard task of writing is central to success in our modern world. To succeed academically, you must master writing to show your teachers and professors what you have learned. To succeed professionally, you must use writing to coordinate efficiently with others to accomplish tasks. If you don’t learn to write well, you will likely end up working below someone who can. 

Given the importance of writing in our world and the effort it takes to write, it is unsurprising that we are seeing the rise of Generative AI tools like ChatGPT that promise to do this work for us. These tools take advantage of an important feature of human writing: we use patterns to communicate with each other efficiently. These tools analyze common patterns in our writing to predict the most likely response to requests. For instance, if we ask ChatGPT to write a five-paragraph essay about the importance of writing, it analyzes thousands of examples of this genre, sentences within this genre, and texts about the importance of writing. It makes complex calculations about the most likely patterns that best answer our request, generating a text for us in seconds. There is no doubt that these tools will change our relationship to writing in the coming years.

Well, now what? Maybe you don’t need to take a writing course after all. Maybe I can walk away from the hard work of writing this textbook. I’m imagining all of the free time that I’ll suddenly have. Maybe I’ll have a nap or just stream a video or two. 

But wait! There are good reasons for humans to write and learn to write despite the effort it takes. In a world where computing is becoming more powerful, we need to understand what is human about writing and how human (and not computer) writing can impact the world around us. Here are some important reasons for us to write.

Human Writing is Thinking

When we write something, we organize the chaos of the world around us. We choose words, arrange words into chains (sentences), and develop coherent messages from these chains of words. This work of organization is also the work of thinking. We learn how to see and understand the world through writing. Writing helps us to take apart the world and to put it back together in new ways.

Human Writing is Learning

Have you ever written an essay where you started with one idea about a topic, and by the time you finished, you had another idea about the topic altogether? You learned about the topic as you wrote about it, so your ideas evolved. Writing helps us structure our thoughts and allows us to learn. If you look back at what you have been asked to write in school, you will likely agree that writing assignments forced you to think differently and more in-depth about something in a way that a multiple-choice test did not.

Human Writing is Memory

Writing endures in a way that our (unrecorded) speech does not. In this way, writing preserves memories about human experiences. Imagine a world without the authentic written records and memories of the humans who came before us. Such a world would be much less rich than our present world. Here’s an example, which I share with permission. When my aunt was 16 years old, she had a baby who she gave up for adoption. This was the 1960s, and getting pregnant was a source of shame at that time; no one in my family ever spoke about this situation. However, I was close to my grandmother, who handed me a letter one day. It was from my aunt to my grandfather, who had passed away by that time. In this letter, my aunt expressed gratitude for her father’s understanding and kindness when she got pregnant. I learned about my aunt’s pregnancy from that letter. More importantly, I learned about a deeply meaningful moment of compassion between my grandfather and his daughter. This moment in my family’s history would have been lost without the power of writing.

Human Writing is Voice

Every human writer has a unique way of expressing themselves. This is what we call “voice” in writing. Voice makes us feel that a human is speaking to us through the writing. It makes writing lively and helps connect the writer and the reader. Voice makes writing magical, and it is not something that Generative AI can replicate. Generative AI writes using the most common pattern of words, but the writer’s unique voice is often a small break in these patterns, a little bump that makes us pay attention and allows us to see the world slightly differently.

Human Writing is Community

Think about how you communicate with your family and friends. You likely spend time texting or messaging your favourite people. What if you discovered a friend was using Generative AI to correspond with you? None of the answers to your texts were authentic. You were communicating with a computer. You would likely feel betrayed. Why did your friend do this? Did they think so poorly of you that using a computer to answer was better than writing themselves? Did they think so poorly of themselves that they didn’t trust their answers to you? This scenario would likely raise many questions which relate to the social nature of writing. We use writing to connect with others and build relationships with them, whether professional or personal. We use writing to coordinate with others to achieve our shared goals. If we don’t write or learn to write, we miss out on these important opportunities to participate in the communities around us.

Human Writing is Power

Learning to write well helps us find power as individuals and members of society. We can use writing to convey our unique human experiences, and we can use writing to inspire others to make our world a better place. There are some powerful examples of how writing has changed the course of history. Consider the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which details the experiences of slaves in the 19th-century United States. The book is credited with helping to change attitudes towards slavery and paving the way for the Civil War (Reynolds, 2011). Other written works like the King James Bible (an early English translation of the Bible), Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and George Orwell’s 1984 (to name but a few) have had a profound impact on our world. The pen, it is said, is mightier than the sword.

Writing is one of the most important human inventions, and in the age of Generative AI, we must understand how our humanity is intricately linked to the task of writing. While Generative AI may help us with some writing tasks, we should ensure we don’t miss opportunities to become better thinkers and communicators. We need to develop human judgment about what makes writing effective so that we can assess any writing that Generative AI produces.

Writing may be difficult, but there are ways to help improve your writing process and make your writing more effective. This textbook aims to provide knowledge and strategies to improve your writing and help you embrace your lifelong journey as a writer.

References

Campbell, G. (2010). The Holy Bible: quatercentenary edition: an exact reprint in Roman type page for page, line for line, and letter for letter of the King James Version, otherwise known as the Authorized Version, published in the year 1611, with an anniversary essay by Gordon Campbell (Quatercentenary ed). Oxford University Press. (Original work published in 1611)

Darwin, C., & Costa, J. T. (2009). The annotated Origin: a facsimile of the first edition of “On the origin of species.” Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. (Original work published in 1859)

Reynolds, D. S. (2011). Mightier than the sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the battle for America. W.W. Norton & Co.

Stowe, H. B. (2007). The annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin. W.W. Norton & Co. (Original work published in 1852)

Wollstonecraft, M. (2007). A vindication of the rights of woman. Pearson Longman. (Original work published in 1792)

Attributions

“Why Do Humans Write?” by Nancy Bray, Introduction to Academic Writing, University of Alberta, is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0