In pursuit of desirable difficulties

The psychologist Robert Bjork called them desirable difficulties. Learning sticks better when practice is made harder, rather than easier. Students who have to struggle to retrieve an answer remember it longer - and clearer - than students who are handed the same answer with minimal effort on their part. The effort is where the knowledge is actually built. Without effort, knowledge slips away.Writing runs on the same principle. When you do battle with the language, when you fight a sentence into shape yourself, tooth and nail, you earn the finished prose. You know where the argument bends, you know where the logic goes thin, where one word can do the job of three.Your struggle leaves fingerprints. But if a machine hands you a clean paragraph in five seconds, while you sit back and daydream, there are no fingerprints. There can never be fingerprints. The paragraph can be genuinely good, and for all I know, it probably is genuinely good, and that's part of the trouble. A half-baked…