Recentering the Poetic Function in (Creative) Writing Across the Curriculum

I was going to subtitle this post “Naming What We Lose in GenAI Offloading,” but by now, I believe we know. Anecdotally, not just most writing teachers and creative writers never want to discuss the topic again, but everyone I talk to who’s not a creative writer or academic can point to applications, specifically in writing, that trouble them. People using it sound like a robot, they tell me. People using it have clearly offloaded work to a bot, they add. I along with them fret, Does anyone know what anyone’s saying in AI text anymore?

My aim here isn’t to decry a blasted tech. I’m here to go over something I think is worth remembering about writing and language, and specifically the function of language when, say, writing fiction.

First, let’s define writing. We know from writing across the curriculum (WAC) and rhetoric and composition that writing is a mode of thought, of inquiry, a social activity as well as a cognitive one. But I want to go back to Walter Ong’s chapter, which is also Ong’s thesis, Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought. Ong makes many points. One is that writing is more than a mechanical skill that reflects how our thoughts look, but instead writing requires us to embed in our messages an audience’s memory for context and purpose to be clarified; writing, Ong argues, changes how we arrange sound-sequences into words to reflect a semblance of lived experience and asks us to order words for future readers. For Ong, “Writing is a consciousness-raising and humanizing technology” (31). It’s the software within our neurobiological hardware allowing us, if we read as well as write, to transcend space-time.

Now, to touch on a topic that’s far from anything new in WAC and writing studies: language’s poetic function. Linguist Roman Jakobson defined the poetic function; let me present it in a found poem, because it’s a tangled expression replete with German:

What I take away from Jakobson’s definition here is that poetic writing is writing for its own sake, not to achieve a social goal first, but to create. Because it draws attention to itself as a message, poetic or creative writing makes us aware that those words here on the page are not the objects out there though, amazingly, we recreate in our mental mutterings the expression of language through this technology. For Jakobson, and my interpretation of his talk, poetic writing’s form is function. That is, while a scientific report can theoretically share the same results through a hundred different expressions and turns of phrase, can be presented as an infographic or poster, a poem is unique in that, when we finish it, it cannot change its form and still express precisely what we meant. Fiction too. How many times do we read through a draft before it’s done? Five, twenty, a hundred? Those lines are exactly as we need them. Each phrase, punctuation, pause, breath. That’s why we get so feral when an editor messes with our commas.

I get it: Not everyone wants to be this kind of writer. Wants to be a writer. Still, when we teach writing or talk about writing, we can promote what we value about writing as a tech not just as a way to share ideas but as a way to use even mechanics and phrasing and word choice in such a focused way that any change also wrecks our original meaning (at least to us, at that moment of “finishing” an audience-focused draft). To clarify, I’m not arguing that writers adhere to, say, Standard Edited English. Just that we own all aspects of our forms.

WAC scholars as far back as forty years asked us to consider the values we cherished in writing and recommended we consider cultivating in writing instruction; Art Young and Britton et al. in the late-70s and early-80s distinguished poetic writing from expressive and transactional, as I visualize here:

It was Dan Melzer in his book Writing Assignments Across the Curriculum who determined that most students, even back in the 2010s, were rarely asked in college to do expressive or poetic writing.

To me, bearing in mind the poetic function of writing, where writing is done for its own sake, where the form is the message and the function, adds an urgency to resisting technologies that take care of any aspect of writing for us. It also, more than ever, presents a moment for what I’ve discussed, based on the discussions of many others before me, as Creative Writing Across the Curriculum, which is experiences of informal (see Figure above) poetic writing that allows writers in any class, specifically those not designated as a creative writing course, to experience how it feels to write creatively (poetically). The experience has widely been described for most students as an engaging one that promotes a person’s individual voice and promotes the understanding of oneself as well as others.

My call for action, then, would be to remember the poetic function of language as applicable to all discussions of writing whenever someone says, just let AI do it. That impulse to let AI do it paints that writing as transactional. Poetic/creative writing is done to do it … to do all of it. The experience is the point. The transportation into a built world. The building of that world. We teachers and writers, for instance through hands-on practice and workshopping of writing, through demonstration of how writers write, should share how our forms of writing, the outside appearance from concept to comma, result from exhilarating experiences. Seen this way, writing’s gifts are such that we’d never dream of offloading any bit of it to a bot.

 

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Works Cited

Britton, James et al. The Development of Writing Abilities (11–18). Macmillan, 1975.
Jakobson, Roman. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, The Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960, pp. 350-377.
Melzer, Dan. Assignments across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing. Utah State University, 2014.
Nicholes, Justin. Creative Writing across the Curriculum: Meaningful Literacy for College Writers across Disciplines, Languages, and Identities. John Benjamins, 2022.
Ong, Walter J. “Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought.” Linguistics of Literacy, edited by Pamela A. Downing et al., John Benjamins, 1992, pp. 293-320.
Young, Art. “Considering Values: The Poetic Function of Language.” Language Connections: Writing and Reading across the Curriculum, edited by Art Young and Toby Fulwiler, National Council of Teachers of English, 1982, pp. 77-97. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/language_connections/chapter6.pdf.