Verbal Tea: Reading the Leaves
Language mediates raw experience and shared understanding, transfiguring private perception into communicable meaning. Linguistically mediated acts of writing have not been adequately theorized in the field of composition studies since James Moffett in the 1960s, in my opinion.
Looking up, looking into, looking around, writing up, looking through, writing down, looking over, writing about, looking out, writing out, writing over—
all of Moffett’s verbs and prepositions and more that resonated even with my fourth graders. Why do teachers still use words referring to the obvious: prewriting, writing, and post-writing. Are these not just beginning, middle, and end?
This essay argues that our understanding of writing pedagogy must evolve beyond simplified process models to embrace multiple forms of mediation from traditional linguistic tools to AI assistance to collaborative meaning-making. Just as painting evolved to capture new forms of modern experience, writing instruction needs theoretical frameworks that acknowledge how technology and collaboration are transforming how we construct and share meaning.
The development of techniques in painting provide a useful comparison. Be aware that it simplifies both fields and should be read as an interpretive analogy rather than a rigorous historical account. There is plenty to debate in it, but I shall take a risk.
Impressionism's break from Academic art offers a striking parallel to our changing relationship with written mediation. In response to industrialization, both painters and writers faced a world moving at unprecedented speed: Trains, urban crowds, factory rhythms, mechanical reproduction. Academic painting's careful studio techniques couldn't render this new velocity, just as traditional prose reached a breaking point in a world of fragmentary modern experience. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway buying flowers for her party walking the same streets of London that a traumatized, young World War I veteran named Septimus Warren Smith walks one fine Saturday in 1921 or thereabouts crystallizes the intersection of painted Impressionism and modern written prose.
Impressionists responded to dehumanization by making their mediation visible, culturally and aesthetically material, quick brushstrokes, unblended colors, scenes of modern life caught in motion. They accepted that perception itself had changed. Similarly, some contemporary academic writers acknowledge that AI tools are reflections of how modern consciousness processes ordinary information in rapid bursts, from multiple perspectives, in layered meanings.
In both cases, the tools of mediation must evolve to match the quickening pulse of experience. Cubism then revolutionized perspective itself, allowing multiple simultaneous viewpoints much as AI writing tools now enable us to view language choices through multiple lenses at once, fracturing and reassembling meaning in new ways.
This parallel is far from perfect, a feeble attempt to make sense of a hurricane. Art history and writing technology follow different trajectories. Nonetheless, for the charitable of mind, it illuminates how tools of mediation can evolve from hidden to visible to transformative. Just as Cubism didn't negate Impressionism but expanded artistic possibility, AI doesn't replace traditional writing but offers new ways to understand how we construct meaning.
The comparison between painting's evolution and our changing relationship with written expression opens up deeper questions about how we mediate experience through language. Just as the Impressionists made visible their tools and techniques, we must make visible the specific ways language transforms raw experience into shared meaning. This brings us to a more granular exploration of the verbs and actions through which writers shape understanding, tools that, like the Impressionist's visible brushstrokes, bring heightened awareness of the transformative work of turning perception into communication.
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Like musical scales, sculptor’s chisels, and Aristotle’s syllogisms, language mediates between raw experience and shared understanding, transforming private perception into utterances, some ephemeral, some enduring. These transformative acts can be expressed through specific verbs, each describing a distinct friction that language introduces to bridge the gap between experience and shared understanding..
To filter is to screen and select, to shape is to mold and form, to structure is to find patterns in chaos, color tints meaning, diffraction splits wholes into components, refraction bends perception, channels guide flow, frames set boundaries, crystallization solidifies fluid experience, texture adds layers, and to articulate joints superglues elements together.
These mediating verbs might become especially powerful when writers work together, sharing their transformative processes. Consider how writing partnerships might approach shared observation. Two writers choose a seemingly ordinary event—their high school marching band's halftime show—but approach it as anthropologists making the familiar strange. They research marching band history, interview older community members about past performances, study how other schools handle halftime. This background helps them see beyond their usual 'just another halftime show' perception.
They select two mediating strategies: First, one writer will filter, recording what aspects of the complex event emerge as significant on an individual, group or temporary community level. The second writer will refract, bending their observation from entertainment to ritual, i.e., allocating attention the acts that evoke different flavors of collective emotion and to those that one would see at any such event. Both writers will have options to choose other special tools as opportunities arise.
After the event, each writes their mediated account in solitude, texturing the draft in layers of inference and observation. Then they turn to AI not just as editor but as a third perspective. They might prompt: 'Here are two accounts of a marching band performance using filtering, refracting, and texturing strategies. How do our choices differ? What patterns emerge in our selection and emphasis? What aspects of the event did we both miss?' The AI becomes a metacognitive partner, helping them understand not just the event, but how they've mediated it through language.
As a partnership they make a single draft without AI mediation and then seek human mediation in a conference with other writers in the community to discuss their original work. They repay their peers by providing feedback on the other partnership’s work. Each partnership revises collaboratively, prepares a final draft, and prompts AI to read it from the perspective of a student in the high school as if the text were published in a school newspaper. They discuss AI feedback, make any changes they agree to, seek mediation from their teacher if needed, and publish their piece on the class “Junior Year Experiences” website managed by the class secretary with the help of the class yearbook committee.
This collaborative marching band scenario illustrates how mediating verbs and AI tools can work together in collaborative nd integrated practice, but it also raises important questions about how such approaches fit within existing educational participation frameworks. The tension between traditional individual assessment and the potential of collaborative, technology-enhanced writing points to a broader challenge facing both high schools and higher education. Faculty are called on to critically evaluate how writing instruction is currently constructed, valued, measured, and especially integrated across disciplines. This faculty collaboration in itself models the work that individual instructors need to do in classrooms.
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As research in writing instruction increasingly suggests that the interplay of human cognition, technological tools, and place-based pedagogical approaches offer hope of restructuring for greater success, there is a need for teacher-university projects to research how these elements coalesce in authentic learning environments. The writer's craft emerges as an orchestration of multiple mediating tools—from metalinguistic awareness, linguistic knowledge, cognitive strategies and human social participation and interaction to AI-enhanced technologies—all of which can be systematically taught, learned, self-assessed, and assessed in classroom cultures rooted in principles of legitimate peripheral participation.
A study published in 2019 carried out at a small liberal arts college in the southern part of the U.S. asked faculty members to rate the level of attention they pay to each of the seven learning outcomes adopted by the college as a whole. Par for the course in universities, the most significant outcomes valued were writing/critical thinking. I’ve found it fascinating to observe over the years the absorption of critical thinking by writing in higher education. I’ve also found it incredible that universities do not value “reading” as a learning outcome. But in this study’s findings I’m most interested in the two lowest scoring outcomes:
Written communication is a lone wolf outcome in higher education. The assumption of one student-one paper is dominant from English faculty to Historians and Scientists. In addition to being a pain to manage, collaborative authorship is challenging to grade. The same one student-one thinker is true for critical thinking, and the most common source faculty turn to to assess critical thinking is writing, a move that has several serious liabilities in terms of reliability and validity of measurement. I’m not the first to make this observation based on high-quality research.
Integrative learning and collaboration, the two lowest rated outcomes, may well prove to be the most important capacities to develop as enablers of critical thinking in relation to problem-solving and creativity—creating the platform of excellence in writing. Part of the problem may derive from hardening of the categories, i.e., conceiving of learning as a set of separate outcomes rather than, well, integrated.
A deeper understanding of the dynamics of AI mediation for good or ill can be found through university-school research partnerships in AI-integrated classroom contexts. Practical pedagogical knowledge can be constructed from robust qualitative research that examines the intricate dynamics of collaborative writing opportunities. As writing increasingly involves the interplay of human cognition, technological tools, and pedagogical approaches, we must investigate how these elements coalesce in authentic learning environments.
The writer's craft develops from the skillful and strategic cognitive handling of multiple mediating tools—from human interaction to tool-enhancing technologies—all of which can be systematically taught, acquired, and evaluated. Qualitative studies can illuminate the nuanced ways these partnerships foster writer development, revealing how students and educators navigate and leverage these various resources.
Such research would not only document the evolving nature of writing instruction but also provide valuable insights into designing more effective collaborative frameworks. These frameworks must honor both traditional writing practices and emerging technological affordances while maintaining rigorous standards for instruction and assessment. By closely examining how students engage with assigned writing tasks through a qualitative lens, educators can create learning environments that embrace the full spectrum of writing tools. Importantly, such work can help reduce current tensions in the field, allowing those who want to deal pragmatically with AI in the writing classroom to avoid the stigma of one who willingly sacrifices traditional academic values like integrity and hard work and effort—friction, I believe is the word du jour.