In defence of close reading and writing as forms learning and assessment

 

Marginalia from page 72 of the Códice Emilianense 60, San Millán de la Cogolla. Photograph by Rafael Nieto, via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Three fingers write, but the whole body labours.

Medieval scribal proverb found in manuscript colophons

Language and learning after GenAI

Education after GenAI may depend less on proving who can speak and write unaided and more on creating the conditions for experience in the world, attention, close reading, and writing to generate understanding.

Rather than treating learning mainly as a performance to be authenticated, higher education may need to return to something older and slower (and more expensive) that has been one of the primary methods of teaching in the humanities: designing environments where meaningful encounters with the world are followed by reflection, articulation, and dialogue. In these environments, reading and writing do not just record knowledge; they become the medium through which understanding takes shape and becomes shareable.

This is apropos of a familiar idea that is quietly circulating now in universities: if AI can write, assessment should move back to either invigilated exams or the viva voce—speech under questioning and knowledge demonstrated in real time. It carries a strange, long-standing Platonic assumption: that knowledge already exists inside the mind and can simply be drawn out through dialogue. Implicit in this view is a particular link between knowledge, memory, and meaning: that what we know is already stored within us, waiting to be recalled and displayed under questioning.

Meaning, memory, and the work of writing

But much of what the humanities have practised for centuries suggests something else, despite a recent hard-right fascination with public debating that has also been circulating, not surprisingly misunderstanding the point of debate and treating it as a form of social jiu-jitsu. Meaning rarely precedes articulation; it emerges through it. Memory itself is not a static store but something reshaped when we return to experience, language, and interpretation. Understanding is not extracted because the world, and ourselves, are not repositories of meaning to be mined; understanding is formed through attention, experience, and articulation. Treating learning and the world as repositories is a sure way of educating a generation condemned to solipsism, who seen its identity as a resource to be mined for production.

Writing plays a decisive role in this process of attention, experience and articulation. Slowing thought down—through drafting, revision, and the careful ordering of ideas—it allows experience to become intelligible. In doing so, it does more than produce knowledge; it helps build the narrative continuity through which individuals recognise themselves as thinking subjects. Writing, then, links knowledge, memory, and identity: it externalises reflection, allowing us to examine what we think, revise it, and situate it within a wider world of shared meaning.

The theatre of assessment: performance and authority

There is also a rhetorical manoeuvre, or a sort of Judo throw, embedded in this reaction from higher education, as there usually is. Faced with a technology that can generate language at scale—and therefore disturb higher education’s core business, the production and commercialisation of intellectual authority—the institutional instinct is to absorb the disruption and return it to the public in familiar form. Authority is reaffirmed through controlled performance: the exam hall, the viva, the demonstration that knowledge resides in the authorised individual. The system closes ranks around its traditional stages.

In that sense, the response can feel oddly theatrical—a dramaturgical engine for regenerating the capital of authority. The same institutional actors who navigated previous crises—financialisation, massification, digitalisation, and the repeated repudiation of asynchronous learning—reappear with slightly revised scripts. The roles change, the stage directions shift, but the cast of newly minted AI experts remains familiar. The message is reassuring: the authority of the university remains intact, merely adjusting its procedures, academic integrity policies, and presenting this as change and innovation.

In this sense, these performances also connect to the way higher education commodifies its authority. Universities do not simply produce knowledge; they certify it. They legitimise particular forms of learning, claim to cultivate critical thinking, and attest to the skills students are expected to carry into their professional and personal lives. Assessment therefore functions not only as a pedagogical mechanism but also as a public demonstration of that legitimising power—evidence that the institution can recognise, validate, and circulate authorised knowledge into the wider economy and workplace.

Which would be fine, if authority and certification were a means to learning, rather than teaching being a means through which HE captures and sells its authority as a commodified good, with the promise of social mobility. Much like the Medieval church promised the ascension of the soul by selling indulgencies.

Deeper shifts, as learning begins in the world

The risk here is that the response becomes more concerned with restoring the performance of authority than with examining how knowledge is actually formed, shared, and contested in a world where language itself is now technologically mediated.

If GenAI unsettles the production of authoritative text, responding only by intensifying the theatre of authentication may stabilise appearances without addressing the deeper axiological and epistemological shifts already underway.

Which we urgently need to confront, because learning begins in the world. Something interrupts us: a passage that resists interpretation, a conversation that unsettles our assumptions, a clinical encounter that carries ethical weight. These moments matter because they connect with values already sedimented in our lives.

Critical thinking and reflection do not arise outside that axiological immersion and outside our social and professional lives, with others; they emerge within it. Without that grounding, “critical thinking” risks shrinking into little more than fact-checking, separated from values, and knowledge becomes reflex, reduced to the staged performance of invigilation.

Close reading as a discipline of attention

Close reading is one way of training this attention. 

Not the only one. Many human practices recognise this. Tending a bonsai, copying calligraphy, praying, sitting in silence, practising musical scales—these are disciplines of attention. They do not extract knowledge already present; they cultivate perception over time. They ask us to return, repeatedly, to the same object or gesture until something previously unnoticed begins to appear.

Close reading asks us to remain with a text long enough to notice what complicates our first impressions. But close reading is never isolated. It is contextual. It requires lateral reading, information literacy, the ability to situate claims within wider conversations and sources. It also depends on rhetorical knowledge: the capacity to listen carefully, to reconstruct another argument before contesting it, to question without assuming bad faith.

Attention here is our gymnasium and forum of public reasoning. And in a world that commodifies and erodes prolonged attention, institutions that educate and develop it consolidate not only wellbeing, but democracy.

Writing as artefact

Writing grows directly from this practice. It is where attention is shaped into a form. Drafting, revising, structuring an argument—these are not decorative academic rituals but ways of refining perception itself.

Academic writing, at its best, records a process of inquiry: it shows how an idea was examined, revised, tested against evidence and context. In that sense, writing is not a container for knowledge but a trace of thinking in motion. This is especially valuable if assessment is understood as the art of reading that process and providing feedback on it—and if institutions are willing to scale and resource that work accordingly.

A different learning design loop

Seen from the perspective of learning design, this points to a different organising principle for education. Instead of privileging performance alone, learning can be structured as a loop: meaningful encounters with texts, problems, and experiences in a world which includes academia, where students feel they belong; disciplined reflection through reading and writing, enriched by information literacy, knowledge of the mechanics of language, of History; and dialogue where interpretations meet other voices, in conditions where critical feedback can be heard, felt and decoded. Each stage deepens the previous one. Experience generates questions. Writing captures and refines them. Dialogue exposes them to other perspectives.

Over time, the traces of this work accumulate. Notes, annotations, essays, marginalia, multimodal reflections—these become a portfolio of inquiry. Such portfolios do not simply display competence; they document how someone has learned to attend, interpret, and articulate. They show the formation of judgement over time and build feedback literacy.

Within such a relational pedagogy, GenAI has a role. It can participate in the dialogue—helping surface patterns, suggesting counter-readings, testing claims, tightening language. But it does not replace interpretation or voice. It operates within the conversation rather than speaking in place of it.

Now, there is a risk and a cost, one of academic integrity and scale, and it is here that guided independent study, proper blended learning approaches, and a 21st century digital ecosystem can do a world of good. But that is such an old, repeated, reasonable argument, that I'm not making it here again.

Writing, speaking, and voice

The point is not to choose between speaking and writing. Public speaking remains essential; rhetoric is part of civic life. Thought must eventually step into the world and be heard.

But writing and reading are the slower disciplines through which a voice is formed before it enters that space. When learners read carefully, write seriously, revise, and discuss their work with others, they build not only knowledge but presence.

Approaches that scaffold speaking alongside writing—such as the staged model of developing oral participation proposed here show how these capacities can grow together rather than compete.

Conclusion

If higher education protects the practices of careful reading and disciplined writing—anchored in lived experience and opened to dialogue—it preserves something more important than a method of assessment. It preserves the slow, shared work through which people learn to listen, think, and speak with a voice that is recognisably their own in the world.

As social beings, we also need spaces where writing is read, answered, contested, and extended. Reading, writing, and speaking together allow societies to examine and renew the frameworks of value through which we interpret experience. 

Because it is through this exchange—texts placed into the world, responses returned, meanings revised—we collectively update the axiological horizon that shapes what we consider true, beautiful, worthwhile, or just.