In 1980, an academic historian turned social critic won the National Book Award with his New York Times bestselling book, The Culture of Narcissism. The success of the book came as a surprise to many, and none less so than its author, Christopher Lasch. Yet, if we zoom out, it’s not so hard to see why Lasch remains a notable thinker decades after his death. For one, the topic clearly struck a nerve in millions of readers—including President Jimmy Carter, who invited Lasch to Camp David for a private conversation (although Carter, to Lasch’s chagrin, misinterpreted the book). Perhaps just as important was Lasch’s simple yet elegant prose—his influence as a stylist being equally deserving of recognition as his legacy as one of America’s foremost 20th-century social critics.

But Lasch’s primary responsibility was not writing popular books. He was, first and foremost, a teacher of undergraduate and graduate students in history at the University of Rochester. And like many gifted writers who teach, he found the quality of his students’ writing disappointing and increasingly frustrating. Every year, as he wrote in one particularly exasperated letter to his father during May grading season, “the illiteracy gets worse.” Finally, he snapped.

“On January 31, 1983, the sixteen students in Christopher Lasch’s graduate seminar on American social thought at the University of Rochester came to class expecting a discussion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the feminist contribution to American progressivism. Instead they got a quiz on the basic principles of English composition according to William Strunk and E. B. White.”

With this dramatic anecdote, historian and former colleague Stewart Weaver opens his introduction to Lasch’s writing manual, Plain Style: A Guide to Written English. Why “plain style”? Because good writing, first and foremost, is clear writing.

Lasch’s lament over the steady decline of student literacy is familiar to anyone who has taught undergraduates. The most common complaint—second only to “students don’t do the reading”—is “students can’t write.” But while admitting a problem is often the first step to solving it, this hasn’t been true for writing. Four decades after Lasch’s jeremiad, the situation hasn’t improved and not for lack of trying.

It’s not that no one has tried. In recent decades, college campuses have created writing centers, added English labs to first-year composition courses, and launched campus-wide initiatives to improve writing. Yet student writing keeps getting worse. Could something deeper be wrong—something beyond just grammatical ignorance? That was Lasch’s suspicion. Just a few years earlier, he had published Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, lamenting the collapse of the family in American life. Without that foundation, individuals are adrift. Imagination and intellect suffer too. Student writing, Lasch believed, was just one more area where this broader social decline revealed itself.

While he surely didn’t think that a writing manual could fix the problem, he tried anyway.

Less well known than his other books, Plain Style deserves to be read—not only for its advice but for its wit and social insight. Consider the opening line: “Since the sentence is the basic unit of literary composition, an introduction to style will have to give most of its attention to the misunderstandings, sloppy habits, and misplaced eloquence that lead to ill-formed, tone-deaf, ambiguous, or downright unreadable sentences.”

Lasch’s description of bad writing points to habits of mind and character. Sloppiness, for instance, is a form of sloth, while misunderstanding and ambiguity can become a kind of lying. In this way, bad writing is not just objectively poor, but also malformative to the writer’s soul.

Lasch’s chapters track closely with those in The Elements of Style, which he used in class. A long section on “Words Often Misused” lists common mistakes in alphabetical order—including one still rampant in academic writing: using “an” before “historian” or “history.” Unlike most manuals, though, Lasch pairs bad examples with good ones, offering concrete illustrations and dry humor.

The chapter “Characteristics of Bad Writing” stands out. Lasch begins by pointing readers to George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language.” Why? Because all writing is political, and bad writing and dishonest politics go hand in hand. Here we arrive at the heart of Lasch’s project: writing shapes not only individuals but public life.

For Orwell, truth and intellectual honesty were central to style. Dishonest writers obscure agency with passive voice, avoid responsibility with euphemism, and hide ignorance with jargon. These habits, repeated, corrode character—and civilization. As Orwell warned: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.”

Lasch fully agreed. The words we write reflect who we are, intellectually and morally—and taken together, who we are as a civilization. The “plain style” is not only about clarity but about honesty and intellectual integrity. Or, to go beyond what Lasch says, writing reveals the soul. Good writing is not only true but also beautiful.

But hasn’t artificial intelligence solved all this in 2025? Doesn’t ChatGPT allow us to eliminate bad writing once and for all?

Perhaps from a grammatical standpoint. AI is unlikely to produce the kind of obvious errors typical of a freshman paper. And it can generally get the facts right—though this is still a live issue, with frequent reports of AI inventing sources or evidence.

Yet even if AI were perfectly accurate, it wouldn’t solve the deeper problem. Writing is formational. A recent MIT study using EEG scans across 32 brain regions found that ChatGPT users “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Over time, users became lazier, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the study’s end. In other words, even when AI produces clean prose, it atrophies the mind. Long before the advent of AI, both Orwell and Lasch were concerned with the formation of the writer—not just the writing. Writing shapes people, and people shape societies, especially democratic ones. Teaching good writing, then, is a civilization-building project. It is a way of forming minds capable of truth, goodness, and beauty—in the self and in society alike.