Writing as a Way of Learning

With the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence among college students, the question of writing and the capacity for composition more broadly has become an urgent question for the future of civilization. Ralston College’s own Daniel Gallagher, Lecturer in Philosophy and Literature,  has written at length on this subject throughout this past year, in a series of essays on How To Write an Ivy League Essay, drawing upon years of experience teaching advanced composition at Cornell University and now at Ralston. 

“What if writing is actually the best way to learn?” he asks. At a moment when students can bypass the difficulty of writing altogether, what takes place in the act of writing, at the level of finding, testing, and refining a train of thought, has never been more urgent to understand.

Writing, ultimately, is indistinguishable from thought. What we write reflects what we think, and how far we develop those thoughts is a process we can allow to unfold organically, or decide to actively cultivate. While many know the dread associated with writing on an unfamiliar subject, Professor Gallagher suggests that “the best time to write is precisely when you do not understand a topic, because writing is the best tool for figuring it out.” Beginning with a “sketch”, a writer can move past the stage of capturing notes and toward discovering what is ultimately to be conveyed. Fundamentally, he tells us, “A sketch is an attempt to process your notes and make them comprehensible to you and others.” By revealing the limits of our own understanding, the writing process gives rise to questions we might otherwise never think to ask.

When students outsource this work to large language models in an effort to escape the struggle of a writing assignment, they forgo an invaluable mode of understanding. By failing to face the challenge, students lose out on the fundamental sort of comprehension that can be obtained through the process of writing. More philosophically, Gallagher tells us that “a sketch can help you articulate the key questions that will lead to a greater understanding of the topic.” In the effort to cultivate students capable of independent and critical thinking, mastering the sketch does a lot of heavy lifting. By staying with the questions revealed only by our own ignorance, curiosity can take us to places otherwise inaccessible.

Writing plays a central role in Ralston’s MA curriculum, with each student producing more than 35,000 words of original writing during the academic year. The sustained effort to produce a quality piece of writing reflects Ralston’s conviction that writing is not only a demonstration of knowledge acquired, but an essential component in acquiring it. Together with close readings of Greek and Latin texts alongside seminars in philosophy, literature, and art, the practice of writing helps bring the ancients to life for students willing to meet the challenge. By immersing themselves in ancient Greek and developing a habit of "writing to learn," students are uniquely prepared to thrive in an uncertain future. 

Read Gallagher’s Ivy League Writing series on Medium, beginning with “The First Step in Ivy League Writing.”