Swimmers, Writers, and Writing Teachers: Diving in the Deep End of the Pool

Nov 21, 2024

Ask a swimmer to list types of swimming. Not being a swimmer myself, not having a swimmer on speed dial, not interested in the whispers of artificial authorities, I call upon my brain to imagine. Because I’m not writing for a grade, for peer review, or for finding my seat in the auditorium of scientific research, I’m free to fool around with my imagination:1

There's the water bug crawl—skimming the surface like sunlight on waves.

The sea gull breaststroke—rising and falling with the rhythm of tides.

The sky gazer backstroke—floating ‘neath creamy clouds that drift like thoughts.

The ancient dog paddle—as old as the first wolf who ventured beyond shore.

Right or wrong, the swimming writer swims in the waters of the question, sensing the word "type" not as a tree to climb to pick someone else’s fruit, but as a signal to me to parse variants of the verb "to swim."

The question itself becomes an ocean, each stroke a way of moving through a world in water.

Ask a student writer in a high school classroom to list types of writing. Being a writer, being a writing teacher, being a student of writing, I can guess the response with more authority:

There’s creative writing like stories and poems and stuff.

There’s academic writing like essays and research papers.

There’s personal writing like journals and memoir thingies.

There’s business writing like letters and emails and reports.

And so the beat goes on, each type of writing a noun, a done, a product to be sorted, graded, and forgotten. The student writer sorts well-organized boxes of prescriptions while the swimmer swims for dear life—to repeat, the swimmer swims in the moment, the writer shows up when the writing stops to learn the grade.

Right or wrong in detail, the student writer stands on the shore, seeing the word "type" as a shelf to stock with assignments, missing completely the signal to parse variants of “the verb in writing.”

The question itself for the classroom writer becomes a checklist to complete, not an ocean to brave.

Yet swimming teachers engage instructionally sort of like writing teachers. We need teachers, It seems we have got to be taught these things. Infants don’t appear on the planet ready to swim or to write. Humans traded gills for tonsils millions of years ago, pictographs for alphabets, just as we traded brawn for brain. We have to learn to do our own swimming just as we have to learn to do our own writing.

Some fundamentals of swimming can be taught and learned, but to master them, they must be practiced alone in the wild in communion with water. Breath control and management—knowing when and how to breathe when moving through water—teacher can’t do that for you, but teacher can help with tips and encouragement.

The body problem in swimming is a hard problem, one each individual who learns, learns to solve alone. To function in water the body engages the hind brain, mid brain, and front brain in orchestrated cognition. Swimming is a whole body, whole brain experience as writing is a whole language, whole brain experience.

Buoyancy regulation means working with rather than against the water to float, existential work mitigated only by an external flotation device, i.e., an artificial device. Keeping afloat is good no matter what grade it earns.

Body position and balance means maintaining alignment with the water's surface. Easy to say, really complex to do. Proprioception2, our sixth sense, positions body parts relative to each other and the environment. In water, proprioceptive cues are received as buoyancy and resistance, a two cueing system, requiring the brain to adapt.

Muscle spindles and joint receptors send feedback to the brain about limb positioning, critical for maintaining postural alignment and stability, especially when forces like water currents or buoyancy change body orientation.

The vestibular system in the inner ear detects changes in head position and motion relative to water gravity and inertial forces. In water, this system plays a heightened role because visual cues (e.g., fixed landmarks) may be less reliable. Vestibular inputs help maintain equilibrium by triggering automatic postural responses to stabilize the head and trunk when balance is disturbed.3

The brain integrates sensory information from these systems to create a coherent “body schema,” which represents the body’s position in space. In water, hydrostatic pressure and viscosity enhance sensory feedback by providing constant resistance against movement. This feedback helps refine motor control and balance adjustments.

The central nervous system generates motor commands to adjust muscle activity for maintaining alignment with the water’s surface. For example, anticipatory postural adjustments occur before voluntary movements (e.g., reaching out) to prevent destabilization4. Reactive postural responses are rapid corrections triggered by unexpected disturbances, such as waves or shifts in buoyancy.

Buoyancy reduces gravitational forces on joints and alters proprioceptive feedback, requiring recalibration of balance control5. Hydrostatic pressure provides uniform resistance, enhancing sensory awareness but also dampening rapid movements. Viscosity slows motion, offering time for neuromuscular adjustments but demanding greater effort for precise control.

Repeated exposure to aquatic environments trains the neuromuscular system to adapt to these unique constraints. Just do it—under the intuitive eye of a talented coach. Over time, swimmers develop enhanced proprioception, vestibular sensitivity, and motor coordination specific to water-based tasks.

Although swimming and writing are carried out alone, it seems what we do naturally alone can be done better with teaching in society, to borrow Aristotle’s insight. Infants don't appear on the planet ready to write or to swim. Humans traded pictographs for alphabets thousands of years ago just as we traded memory for manuscripts, but nothing is free. We must learn to do our own writing just as we have to learn to do our own thinking—or we sink helplessly in the mists.

Some fundamentals of writing can be taught and learned, but to master them, they must be practiced in the field of construction. Thought control and management—knowing when and how to breathe when moving through language—teacher can't do that for you.

The how-to-mind problem in writing is a hard problem, one each individual learns to solve for themselves if they aren’t pressured to conform to external specifications and thereby often fake engagement or give up. To function like a swimmer in the ocean of language the executive function looks to the amygdala, the seat of emotions in the mid brain; the logical brain, the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus6; and the creative brain in orchestrated cognition, all of which must be self-learned by experience, all of which can be destroyed by clumsy or overzealous writing instruction.

Neuroscientists have identified not a single location for creative thinking, but a hardwired loop they term the Default Mode Network (DMN7). The DMN is associated with internally focused thought, thoughts never intended to see the light of day, such as mind-wandering, daydreaming, and episodic memory retrieval. It generates creative ideas by allowing free-flowing, spontaneous connections between concepts.

The Salience Network8comes into the picture to prevent the DMN from doing a tailspin into insanity. This network acts as a switch between the DMN (idea generation) and ECN (idea evaluation). It helps prioritize which thoughts or stimuli deserve attention. This network, particularly ECN, may help writers by pulling information about the writing context (audience, purpose, genre, etc.) into the process.

Idea buoyancy means working with rather than against the flow of thought to stay afloat, existential work sometimes gummed up by external distributed thinking devices, prompts, rubrics, mandated structure, instructional constraints, i.e., artificial outside organizing templates. Isolating bots as the only external machine that can short circuit writing cognition by taking over is a fallacy. Writing teachers artificially control writing cognition all the time. Many see it as their job.

Keeping thoughts afloat is good no matter what grade it earns; keeping them afloat in the way teacher wants can bring the gold star, even though the thoughts themselves may sink prematurely.

Mental position and balance means maintaining alignment with meaning's surface—or the teacher’s requirements. Easy to say, really complex to do. Linguistic proprioception, our sense of where we are in the sea of language, positions ideas relative to each other and the context. In writing, these orientational cues are altered due to the fluidity and resistance of language, requiring the brain to adapt.

Cognitive spindles and rhetorical receptors send requests for feedback on emerging meaning to the brain’s executive function9 about idea positioning critical for maintaining coherent meaning, especially when external forces like audience expectations or high-stakes on-demand writing assignments change mental orientation. Executive function refers to a set of cognitive processes that enable goal-directed behavior, including planning, attention control, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibition.

An inner voice developed by toddlerhood in the writing consciousness detects changes in meaning position and motion relative to intention and unconscious forces. In writing, this inner voice plays a heightened role because structural cues (e.g., fixed outlines) may be less reliable guides to emerging meaning. Inner voice inputs help maintain equilibrium by triggering automatic adjustments to stabilize the core meaning when clarity is disturbed.

The mind integrates linguistic information from these systems to create a coherent "meaning schema," which represents the thought's position in conceptual space. In writing, semantic pressure and linguistic viscosity enhance cognitive feedback by providing constant resistance against expression. This feedback helps refine thought control and meaning adjustments.

Reactive internal and provisional rhetorical responses (writing as a reader) are rapid corrections triggered by unexpected disturbances, such as logical gaps or shifts in understanding. Recursive revision is an example of a learned mental practice that stabilizes meaning to allow for idea development.

Linguistic buoyancy reduces gravitational forces from conventional structures but can produce a false sense of freedom when cognitive feedback makes gravity salient, mandating recalibration of meaning control. In other words, a writer who experiences buoyancy in moments of joy can end up with a nose full of water under the weight of having to change paragraphs.

Semantic pressure provides uniform resistance, enhancing awareness but also dampening impulsive expression. Rhetorical viscosity slows thought-to-word translation, offering time for cognitive adjustments but demanding greater effort for precise control.

Repeated exposure to writing environments trains the cognitive system to adapt to these unique constraints. Just do it. Or just do what teacher says. Over time, writers develop enhanced linguistic proprioception, their thoughts moving through language as naturally as a body moves through water.

Or they fear water and leave land only when compelled.

Swimming and writing are embodied, embedded, and enacted activities enabled by cognitive processes, which brain researchers know something about. Swimming education seems to have teaching practices down pat in that teachers function as coaches and expect to have to respond to learners, not to dictate patterns for a crowd of swimmers. Learning to write well is often undermined by institutional approaches.

Providing artificial flotation devices (prompts, templates, formulaic structures) before students learn to sense their own buoyancy in language means never developing trust in their own thinking processes. Why not turn to AI because it's just another flotation device.

Grading each stroke before writers learn to feel at home in this unnatural space of water creates fear of deep water/deep thinking. Students stay in the shallow end of ideas. Why venture out into choppy seas—swimming from Catalina Island to San Pedro, crossing the English Channel—when you get punished for failing to finish?

Focusing writers on the end product rather than on exploring to find the best fit between the writer’s embedded intention and the most effective structure disallows writers to own the swim even before they get it the water. It’s not my swim, the writer feels. Students become copy machines, not swimmers.

Writing can become a matter of connecting the dots on someone else’s canvas. Over-structuring the learning environment means never experiencing the water of raw thinking. Why not do AI? What’s thinking got to do with it? Writers learn that they can’t write without artificial supports.

There’s nothing wrong with shallow end experiences that build confidence without artificial supports. Let writers wade in their own thoughts before demanding the crawls and strokes of ideal swimmers. Value messy first drafts as signs of engagement. Let writers choose which rough drafts to finish.

Recognize and encourage signs of authentic cognitive engagement. Look for evidence of struggle with ideas, not just clean execution, and reward students for diving into cold and challenging open ocean swims with authentic talk about their work, not their grade. Reward risk-taking and recovery.

Build assessment around process markers. Track development of "water confidence" in language. Value self-correction as highly as product perfection.

Protect cognitive space. Think about how it feels to have no cognitive space apart from the teacher and the curriculum. Allow for mental drift time, for getting off topic and coming home with new ideas that appear irrelevant to the casual observer. Don’t fall for the academic siren song of time on task.

When students turn to AI to draft their writing and take over, ask why. What have you done to let them know you value their ideas as much as their writing?Are they fearful? What waters are they afraid to enter? How has years of micromanaged instruction taught them to distrust their own cognitive buoyancy?

Technical writing instruction effectively leaves writers standing on the shore. Fixed solutions for known problems, standard procedures and metrics, an implementation focus with rigid routines, privileging mechanical perfection and compliance with conventions—how does a writer learn to breathe without swallowing water?

Adaptive or responsive writing instruction asks students to write their own prompts. There are no alien, scripted prompts written by a teacher or cut and pasted from a manual to feed the bot. There is the writer and the blank page and knowledge from experience that AI lacks the power to create an intention to write.

We have inherited an industrial model of writing instruction. Moving toward an ecological model could defang AI for those who see it as a snake. Standardization and mass production with a premium on efficiency implies linear processes, quality control, uniform outputs, ultimately producing system control.

An ecological model assumes natural variation and organic growth. Ecology ensures diverse outcomes within systems harmony. Importantly, if we construe a natural ecosystem as a place fostering growth rather than perfection, we have a place for every writer to swim with the porpoises.

Learning to Read, Reading to Learn

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