In January of 2021, it was announced that the SAT would permanently shed its essay section. Of course, it had been optional since 2016, and so perhaps that final nail in the coffin was superfluous. But this move did not occur in a vacuum. The essay has been under attack at all educational levels and especially since the advent of ChatGPT. “The College Essay Is Dead,” argued Stephen Marche in The Atlantic in December 2022, blaming AI for the murder in question. Then this summer, Hua Hsu, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and professor of English followed up on Marche’s thoughts in the New Yorker, asking “What Happens After AI Destroys College Writing?”
A destruction may indeed be afoot, Hsu believes, bringing in both numbers from various studies and anecdotal evidence, like a lunch with two NYU students who admitted to using AI for everything—even for texts to schedule that lunch. Hsu hints at the formational repercussions of this for what students actually learn in college:
“College is all about opportunity costs. One way of viewing A.I. is as an intervention in how people choose to spend their time. In the early nineteen-sixties, college students spent an estimated twenty-four hours a week on schoolwork. Today, that figure is about fifteen…”
I was reminded of theologian Jonathan Tran’s reflections on why college matters: it is a sacred time, set apart for learning, a time suspended from “real life” in a meaningful way. Or, at least, it should be. When done well, it forms hearts, minds, and souls for a lifetime of service and meaningful work. This is what AI now threatens.
What might be the repercussions for our society if the newer generations of high-school and college students—who will then grow up to be the next generations of workers, including writers—will not have any familiarity or experience with the art of writing essays? Considering the catastrophic decline we are seeing in literacy—the result of both ubiquitous smartphones and the availability of AI for writing—it is only a matter of time before the quantity and quality of writers capable of doing heavy intellectual lifting with words will also crash. This is bad news for all democratic societies. The repercussions of the 21st century’s turn to AI-mediated illiteracy will be civilizational in scope. And yet, the essay can still be preserved, so long as there are those willing to preserve it.
The genre of the essay as we know it originates with Michel de Montaigne, a 16th-century French essayist who coined the very term—“essai,” from the French verb “essayer,” meaning, “to try.” The essay, Montaigne thought, was an attempt, an experiment, an exercise in adventurous thought. The length distinguishes the humble essay from a book—the latter is obviously longer. While an academic article proves a particular point to expert audiences based on original research, the essay welcomes diverse audiences into a complex topic they may not otherwise consider. It might rely on well-known information or on interviews. It might lean more personal, bringing the writer into the story at hand. And it might leave the reader to draw their own conclusions instead of being expressly didactic.
Out of all the prominent figures since Montaigne, all of the politicians, novelists, academics, poets, virtually all of them were excellent essayists. The American Founding Fathers, Henry David Thoreau, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Leigh Sayers, George Orwell, Christopher Lasch, Russell Kirk, Wendell Berry. Just like being an excellent public orator was a sine qua non for public prominence and success in the ancient world, so is being a good essayist in the modern world.
Consider the Federalist Papers—85 essays written pseudonymously by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison wrote over just eight months, from October 1787 to May 1788. Their original goal was to convince the people of New York that ratifying the Constitution—the foundation of a strong union among states—would be to their advantage. Short and punchy, each essay states its aims at the outset, often referring to previous essays’ arguments. Proofs follow, using concrete examples from international affairs, history, and more.
In opening Federalist 6, for instance, Hamilton states:
“The three last numbers of this paper have been dedicated to an enumeration of the dangers to which we should be exposed, in a state of disunion, from the arms and arts of foreign nations. I shall now proceed to delineate dangers of a different and, perhaps, still more alarming kind—those which will in all probability flow from dissensions between the States themselves, and from domestic factions and convulsions. These have been already in some instances slightly anticipated; but they deserve a more particular and more full investigation.”
The writing is simple, straightforward, yet undeniably elegant—albeit the sentence structure is more complex than what we typically see today. It also exemplifies how to orient the reader well at the outset, especially when writing about a complex topic for non-specialists. While the perennial joke back when college students wrote their own papers was that it was like a scavenger hunt to find the thesis statement, Hamilton made sure no one ever had to search for his.
But there is also significant creativity involved here. This comes through in the quirky turns of phrase at times—one sentence in Federalist 6 begins with this memorable opener: “A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations…” The artistic aspect of writing also shows in the examples used, bringing together (in this same essay) examples from such diverse places as Ancient Greece and Rome, Carthage, and also modern Holland, Venice, Britain, and more.
The essay’s structure is simple yet effective. The end result is not only a body of work that succeeds in its aim, but also a set of essays still widely read and recognized as foundational texts of political theory, history, and rhetoric. Every single student in America—whether pre-collegiate or collegiate—is bound to encounter these essays at some point.
There are still essayists of this caliber today. I am struck by many essays of Wendell Berry, which convey complex ideas through simple stories and even simpler convictions. Consider one of his most famous essays, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” In it, he makes an argument for his thesis, the essay’s title, rooted in human flourishing as he presents supporting points that are relational as well as environmental. Why does it work? Perhaps because the reader knows he means every word. The vast majority of college students will not become the next Wendell Berry or Montaigne or Sayers or Hamilton. And yet, the process of forming the next generation of public thinkers and writers begins here. The work may seem more challenging than ever, but we should not give up on this mission so easily.
