Writers Who Live in Glass Houses
Life as a Writer
As a writer, I live in a glass house of consciousness. I can see out, readers can see in, but neither of us can fully enter the other's space of thought and feeling. When I write, I'm constantly aware of this barrier - transparent yet impermeable. I can signal to you through these walls, and you can signal back through your reading, but we rely on imperfect translations of experience into language.
The act of writing reveals a curious paradox. The more I focus solely on expressing my private thoughts, the less likely those thoughts are to reach you intact. I’m painfully aware of this point. Instead of simply transcribing my internal monologue, I find myself engaged in a complex negotiation. I shape my words not just to express my thoughts, but to create similar thoughts in your mind. This isn't manipulation; it's the essence of communication itself.
Success for me isn't about pure self-expression or perfect control of reader response. It's about creating a bridge between minds. When I write, I make countless small adjustments: clarifying here, expanding there, always imagining how my words might land in another's consciousness. If you fail to grasp my meaning, I haven't failed at private self-expression—I've failed at building that bridge.
I believe learning to live in a glass house is the fundamental challenge every writer faces: how to remain true to our thoughts while making them accessible to others. It requires a delicate balance between private truth and shared comprehension. This negotiation isn't a betrayal of authentic expression; it is authentic expression, shaped by the very human desire to be understood.
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AI Rings the Doorbell of the Glass House
Enter AI.
A machine appears that can communicate without consciousness and express without private experience. AI writes not from inside a glass house looking out, but from a vast processing of all the written expressions humans have made public. It analyzes patterns, synthesizes responses, but has no inner space of thought to write from.
This makes AI text generation fundamentally different from human writers, though its outputs may seem similar. AI doesn't struggle to bridge the gap between private understanding and public expression because it has no private understanding to convey. When it writes about grief or joy or confusion, it's pattern-matching rather than translating lived experience. It can be eerily effective, but it's effective in the way a mirror reflects, showing us what we've shown it.
Consider a common scene in American high schools: A student sits in English class, struggling with an assigned essay. This student— let's call them a capable learner, successful enough in most subjects—finds writing increasingly alienating as the years progress. The joy of story-writing in elementary school has given way to a rigid focus on argumentative essays and textual analysis.
For this student, writing has become a series of performances, each more disconnected from personal thought than the last. "Make a claim, support it with evidence, follow the rubric"—these aren't inherently bad guidelines, but something vital has been lost in their rigid application. The student learns to write not to explore or express ideas, but to earn points toward graduation.
When this student encounters AI, it seems like a logical solution. If writing assignments have become exercises in following formulas to earn points, why not use a tool that excels at exactly that? If personal engagement isn't valued or assessed, why struggle to provide it? The student isn't rejecting writing itself; they're rejecting a system that seems to have already rejected authentic expression.
I want to understand why capable students might see AI as a rational response to their educational experience. The problem isn't that students have found a way to circumvent writing assignments. The problem is that we've created writing assignments that can be easily circumvented, especially by talented writers with revision and editing skills.
AI as an Educational Enigma
Many teachers will understandably reject this characterization of writing instruction—and reject AI. They'll point to creative assignments, to students who thrive in their classes, to the essential skills that academic writing develops. They're not wrong. Many students do find their way within the current system, and clear analytical writing remains a crucial skill.
But we need to examine why some students find AI so tempting. When students turn to AI, they're telling us something important about the gap between our intentions as teachers and their experience as learners.
What if, alongside teaching argumentative structures and analytical skills, we created spaces where AI couldn't possibly serve as a substitute? Not just assignments that document the writing process—AI can describe process steps convincingly—but assignments that capture the evolution of complex individual thoughts.
Students might track how their understanding of a text changes through multiple readings, map their changing reactions to evidence that challenges their initial views, or analyze the gap between what they want to say and what they're actually able to express. These aren't merely reflective exercises; they're metacognitive investigations into how writing shapes thinking and thinking shapes writing.
This isn't about lowering standards—if anything, it raises the bar by asking students to engage in two complex tasks simultaneously: developing ideas through writing and analyzing how that development occurs. It's about reconnecting writing instruction to its sociocultural essence: using written language not just to convey finished thoughts, but to discover what we think in the first place.
The real challenge of the AI era is philosophical. While AI can arrange words convincingly, it cannot engage in the exclusively human experience of using language to discover and refine meaning. Are we assessing arrangement skills that AI can replicate, or meaning-making skills that require consciousness?
The future of writing instruction lies in embracing what AI cannot do: engage in the genuine struggle to develop new understanding through written language. Our task as educators is to make that struggle feel worthwhile by showing students how writing can help them discover what they think, not just demonstrate what they know.
The glass house of consciousness can feel like a prison or a sanctuary. Our job is to help students make it a space where they can safely struggle with their own thoughts and learn to shape that development through writing.
Only then will they understand why AI, for all its pattern-matching capabilities, can never substitute for the deeply human act of using written language to discover what we think. How AI can actually serve as a productive writing tool comes next.