Writing Will Always Be An Essential Skill

Over the past several months, my LinkedIn feed has become almost entirely related to AI. Scrolling through it now is like trying to part a sea of angry people, with one side proudly rejecting AI and the other breathlessly touting its benefits. One recurring theme, whether expressed with dread or anticipation, is that writing is dead. The argument goes that, because AI has grown sophisticated enough to write emails, copy, and term papers, we are heading towards a future where human labor will not be required for writing. This, I think, misses the point by viewing writing solely as an academic or economic exercise. Even if every writing job gets replaced by AI, it will still be necessary for humans to develop writing skills. Writing is one of the main ways in which we can express ourselves, and the ability to express ourselves will always be an essential skill.

A toddler lacks self-expression. If they are thirsty, scared, or tired, they cry. It’s an outburst of emotion with no nuance. Later, they might be able to differentiate these desires by making simple hand motions to ask for water or by grabbing onto their parent’s leg if they're scared, but they’re still expressively limited. Because they have yet to develop the skills to properly express themselves, they fall back on emotion. 

Adults, for the most part, have mastered the ability of self-expression.  Although this ability varies from person to person on a spectrum between grunting to answer a question and crafting an eloquent speech, most adults can adequately communicate their needs. I credit this, in part, to our learned ability to express ourselves through writing. Specifically, writing about our thoughts and emotions.

Elementary education understands this. Most second or third graders write their first essays on something personal like what they did over the summer or a favorite memory. Not only is it generally easier for kids to write about something they are familiar with, but it also teaches them to be introspective, which is helpful throughout life. In a series of studies in the 1980s, Dr. James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin showed that expressive writing – translating our emotions into words – can have powerful effects on helping us feel better, heal from trauma, and live happier lives. 

As we age, we tend to become more introspective, but our writing training gets flipped. Outside of a few college application essays, higher educational systems don’t ask us to write about ourselves very often. The focus instead becomes on how well we can analyze literature, case studies, or scientific concepts. Critical thinking is important, but our self-expression skills stagnate. If not used for a prolonged period of time, they atrophy.

Today, AI models like Claude and ChatGPT are becoming widely adopted. With our free time disappearing and our mental capacities stretched to the limit, it’s convenient to hand over more and more of our writing to these AI models. So our skills slip a little further. We may not regress all the way to the toddler stage where emotional outbursts replace intelligent discussion (though this is certainly true for some of us), but we will regress.

But if everyone is doing it, why does it matter? We don’t lament our inability to write cursive because most people are comfortable with a keyboard. Which skills are prized change with the times, right? Except that communication skills, especially writing, will always be important. Not only as a tool of self-reflection, but as a key metric of career success.

This is true regardless of what field you’re in. If you’re a financial advisor, for example, you need to convince clients to trust you with their money. If you’re barely able to string two sentences together, that’s going to be an uphill battle. If you’re a small business owner, you could use AI to craft amazing lead-generating emails, but you’ll eventually need to have an in-person conversation with prospective customers. If you can’t express yourself well enough to demonstrate the value of your business, you’re dead in the water. In these examples, I group conversation and writing under the umbrella of ‘communication skills’ because I believe that the quality of our writing reflects the quality of our thoughts. Writing has a way of helping us order and clarify our thoughts. Each time we direct our energy towards translating the chaos of our minds into neat sentences and paragraphs, we smooth the creative pathways in our brain and strengthen the neurons and synapses responsible for self-expression.

I’m not an AI doomsdayer. I have no issue with people using it to write for them, just like I have no problem with people using a microwave to heat their food. There are times when it’s just way more convenient to do so. But if you exclusively use a microwave to cook every meal, you’re probably not taking the best care of your body. So I hope that people still will choose to take care of their brains and flex their self-expressive muscles through their own writing.