Right writing

Nostalgia for the pre-AI era grips us. Dr Mohamed Mannaa confesses “I remember what it meant to write before this era. Writing a single paragraph often required reading dozens of papers, abandoning weak ideas, and slowly learning how to synthesize evidence into something coherent. It was difficult, frustrating, and time-consuming. But that difficulty was not incidental. It was how scientific thinking was formed. As many writing scholars have argued for decades, writing is not just a way to report what we think; it is one of the main ways we arrive at what we think (see, for example, Emig’s classic discussion of writing as a mode of learning).” Fair enough, but not really an argument for avoiding AI, which, it’s true, is not exactly what Dr Mannaa is doing at his Scholarly Kitchen piece, which is where these words come from. No doubt Erasmus might have mused “I remember what it meant to write before this era — you had to travel all around Europe consulting unique manuscripts in a whole…