Writing is messy business. Long before generative AI entered the scene, packaged curricula had attempted to sanitize the process by drilling students through five-paragraph essays that neatly structured the writing process into a rigid formula. For years, well-meaning teachers have posted “perfect” examples of writing in their classrooms, focusing on the finished product and overlooking the behind-the-scenes toil it took to get there. AI can now take the toil away with a few prompts and even less cognitive effort. Everything is clean, and the writing is seemingly perfect. But the focus on the product largely ignores the reason writing is foundational to learning in the first place.
Writing as Thinking
In a combined K–12 and university faculty workshop on AI integration that I attended, my thinking was challenged by a high school principal who embraced AI integration across English courses. His insistence that AI could do better what students and teachers had struggled with for years nagged at a fundamental tension I’d experienced as an English language arts teacher even before AI muddied the waters: What is the purpose of writing in K–12 classrooms?
If the purpose of writing is to produce tightly structured and grammatically correct formats, then he was right. AI can do that better than any student or teacher could hope to on their own. However, as a teacher of writing and a passionate teacher-writer, I have never started my own compositions with format and correctness at the front of my mind. When faced with the blank page, my focus is on expressing ideas, communicating thoughts, and wrestling with how to get the jumble of what’s happening inside my brain onto the paper to share with others. Worrying about format, structure, and usage is a later stage of my process.
We have created our current writing crisis by relying on the easiest ways of teaching and evaluating it, which has taken priority over its purpose. Teaching a writing format is objective; it’s easy to grade and give feedback on. We can teach it through simple right and wrong examples: the thesis is stated early on and is often referred to, the margins are standard, and the citations support the claims. These are important elements of academic writing, but we have made them the building blocks rather than the refinements.
The purpose of writing in school is not the finished product; it is the process of thinking that’s crucial (Menary, 2007). A goal of every classroom is to get our students to think critically—and writing is the best tool for that job.
The only way to get students to embrace the trickiest parts of writing is to do it alongside them.
During class discussion, I don’t ask students for the first thought that pops into their minds. I ask them to quick-write in their notebooks for one to three minutes and then share their thinking. The time it takes to physically compose is the time it takes their brains to work through what they really want to express. Writing can make critical thinking a habit.
The Importance of the Paper Notebook
I reintroduced paper notebooks as the primary tool of learning in my college classroom because I was worried about the rise of AI and the formulaic, robotic language that started to infiltrate my students’ reflections. What I was reading in their assignments had zero connection to the people in my classroom. In a course focused on how preservice teachers use reflection to become culturally responsive educators, I left the semester not knowing whether I was talking to them or to the machines they had used to offload the hardest part of writing: the thinking and the messiness.
When my students have completed a writing assignment in their notebooks, they must take a picture of their notebook entry and upload the photo to our learning management system. Once they realize that I’m evaluating their notebooks on their critical thinking and on any connections they make to course learnings, their thinking runs free across the pages.
We read articles on classroom climate and how to create spaces that maintain high expectations while still letting students feel safe enough to make mistakes. Their notebooks come alive with how they want to accomplish these things, even as they continue wrestling with their own fears of failure. They stop apologizing for misspelling words and using run-on sentences, and they get messy in the margins. They fill empty space with their own annotations, going back to read what they’ve jotted down and adding or crossing out material as needed. They don’t ask how long the writing has to be or if I want a certain format. Some of them favor bulleted lists, and some feel comfort in the structure of classic paragraphing.
Of course, paper notebook reflections are harder to grade. I must decipher scrawls of writing that stretch the limits of my bifocals. But I can see students’ thinking in action on the page. I can see them as individuals.
Embracing the Mess—Starting with My Own
The most difficult part of encouraging my students to use writing as a tool for thinking is their deeply ingrained belief that writing must be “perfect.” They don’t want me to see the errors they make on their own before technology can intervene. But I can’t tell them to embrace the mess without first modeling my own.
Kelly Gallagher’s (2006) work on teachers as writing models for their students changed the way I approach every aspect of teaching. I now display my own notebook on the document camera, starting on the first day of class. My students watch how I approach every assignment as I write along with them. During the drafting and reflection processes, I think aloud to remind myself and my students that I don’t care about spelling and grammar right now, that I’m simply putting my thoughts on paper.
Missy Springsteen-Haupt annotates her own writing to show her students the messy but vital work of revision.
Informal journal writing happens every day in my classroom. Students need to grapple with a lot of messy thoughts before we bring computers into the equation. The teacher model carries into this stage. I connect my computer and pull up the blank computer screen with my notebook next to me so they can see the change in composing. They’ve seen me wrestle with the mess in my displayed notebook, and now they watch as I turn those thoughts into something more polished in a document. Most of them think this is the final step, that I have finally allowed them to write comfortably with the computer assistance they’re used to. When they’ve typed a draft, I tell them to print it out and hold on to the hard copy because they will need to bring it to class later on in the semester. They don’t realize that I’m not yet accepting the typed papers as their final draft.
At the end of the semester, my students bring in that printed copy of their draft. I also bring in my printed copy of the paper I worked on as the model. Once again, I’m on the document camera, modeling for them how I reengage with a typed work, how I fit my annotations in the double spacing and in the margins, and how my handwritten notes are in conversation with the version of myself who typed the paper. I add, clarify, argue, and cross out. The sanitized version becomes messy once again because I have learned and unlearned since I wrote it. I reference course concepts in the margins, refining and correcting my previous thoughts to show how I apply new learning.
I provide guidelines for how to annotate. Students need to label and make specific connections to course concepts to show where their thinking has expanded or changed since they first wrote the paper. I want them to call themselves out if they exaggerated, and I want them to reaffirm what they still maintain to be true.
The Problem with “Perfect”
Embracing the mess is hardest for my students who identify as perfectionists. They often come up to talk to me during the process, wanting to clarify that they don’t think they were “bad” in their initial thinking, that they just have more nuanced views now. First, I have to challenge their thinking about what they feel is “bad.” My role as an educator is to be a midwife to the mess by reinforcing my rules for writing: mess is good, it’s how we grow, it’s the essence of how learning happens when we take in more information and then refine our previous thinking. There is nothing “bad” about making a mess in the process of growing. This is literacy. This is learning.
Those who have been most successful at rigidly structured writing in school are often the most terrified to find that learning is messy in my classroom. Their hesitancy toward being messy is the single biggest barrier to their learning and growth.
Mess is good, it’s how we grow, it’s the essence of how learning happens when we take in more information and then refine our previous thinking.
Because humans are messy, our writing can and should reflect that. When I first read Helen Collins Sitler’s (2008) work, I saw myself in her expression that, as a teacher, she worries “more about the students who can’t find an outlet such as poetry for expressing their anxieties and fears than . . . about those who do.” My students who are afraid of showing messy writing engage in a form of self-censorship that worries me. And their fear is warranted. Many have only encountered school writing as something that their teachers judge.
Teachers who don’t model their own writing in the classroom haven’t cultivated an environment safe enough to show that the mess is a vital part of the process. It’s difficult for busy teachers to model the work we’re asking of our students, but the only way to get students to embrace the trickiest parts of writing is for us to do it alongside them.
I tell my students that I know plenty of them probably depend on AI for some aspect of their academic work. It’s unrealistic to think that everyone enjoys the act of writing as much as I do. But it’s crucial to reinforce the importance of messy writing in the AI era, lest we permanently offload our critical-thinking skills.
Writing and the Human Voice
Our job as educators requires us to flip the approach of writing in classrooms from an emphasis on format and correctness to an emphasis on substance. This is a joyful opportunity to put creative writing at the forefront of literacy. Creativity is what sets human writers apart from AI machines. To prepare students for a future where AI may replace many traditional jobs, we must foster the messiness of creativity. It’s necessary for humanity to thrive.
I need to have the most patience with my students who have not yet found their writing voices. They often have powerful ideas in class discussions, but they don’t see how their spoken voice connects to their writing. One strategy I’ve found helpful is having students read their work aloud. This lets them explore their authentic voices and revise based on how they’d actually say something in conversation. This also makes providing feedback more enjoyable and effective for me. When my students write with their authentic voices, my feedback has their humanity at the forefront. I’m not grading papers; I’m coaching humans who I want to move into the world with compassionate hearts and critical minds.
If the purpose of writing is to think, then our writing classrooms must become purposefully messy.
