The real problem with college writing isn't the technology students use—it's what universities stopped teaching decades ago. That's the counterintuitive argument from Close Reading Poetry in a new article making the rounds of literary circles. The claim: artificial intelligence has merely exposed a crisis that was already brewing beneath the surface, and the solution lies not in stricter detection tools but in reviving an ancient discipline that most institutions abandoned.
The past three years have seen AI reshape how students complete written assignments. A 2024 survey from the digital education council found eighty-six percent of university students use artificial intelligence to complete their coursework—a figure that has only grown more extreme in recent months. Close Reading Poetry, who has taught writing-intensive literature courses for seven years, describes watching a marked shift between the papers received in twenty-twenty and those arriving now. But the author sees something beyond the surface-level crisis: the collapse of one of higher education's most enduring competencies—the ability to think and communicate with clarity and eloquence within one's own language.
The Problem Runs Deeper Than AI
Some educators have responded to artificial intelligence by doubling down on in-person writing assignments, while others attempt to integrate AI ethically into coursework. A few major institutions continue to ignore the problem or fail to adequately address it. Students are getting away with using AI not because the technology produces exceptional prose—anyone who regularly reads literature can identify machine-generated writing—but because universities lack the time and infrastructure to chase down every suspected case.
The author argues what's needed is not punitive measures but preventative ones. More importantly, universities themselves risk losing their value if they don't recover what has been lost. College writing isn't quite dead yet, but its current demise has revealed the insufficiencies in assumptions that have informed how writing has been taught for the past fifty or sixty years.
The real problem is not artificial intelligence itself. It's something much deeper: for over half a century, higher education has modeled itself around efficiency and customer satisfaction. What universities must recover is the value of slow thinking, recursive writing, and the art of communication, delivery, and persuasion.
The Case For Returning To Rhetoric
The author believes universities should scrap college composition courses entirely and return to teaching rhetoric—the classical art of communication and persuasion. This was how students learned to write for centuries. The video outlines exactly how this differs from modern composition courses, why it disappeared from curricula in the first place, and offers five concrete reasons for making the shift.
The distinction between composition and rhetoric is stark. College composition generally teaches students how to write papers for academic requirements. Rhetoric prepares students for the civic and moral life of a nation. In composition courses, peers are simply classmates trying to satisfy writing requirements. In rhetoric courses, those peers include a community of great writers and readers who came before them—Cicero, Shakespeare, Frederick Douglass, Virginia Woolf—from whom students learn directly.
Composition teaches students how to write a five-paragraph essay. Rhetoric prepares them to compose a eulogy for their grandfather, deliver a best man speech at a wedding, address a local school board, persuade shareholders at a corporate job, or speak to citizens of a nation. Both encourage honest writing and avoidance of obfuscation and jargon, but rhetoric goes further: it teaches how clarity and style involve moral, emotional, and aesthetic experiences. A good writer is led not so much by technical skill as by instinct—ainstinct tutored by repeated exposure to the greatest writers.
What universities must recover is the value of slow thinking, recursive writing, and the art of communication, delivery, and persuasion.
Rhetoric was slowly purged from American universities as colleges began operating more like businesses. The promise of higher education shifted from spiritual and intellectual formation to financial prosperity. Tuition climbed while humanities were demoted in favor of more lucrative degrees. Composition courses reduced their focus to technical skills and correctness, aligning with standardized evaluation that favored measurable outcomes like page lengths.
Five Reasons To Choose Rhetoric
The first reason: studying rhetoric means students learn directly from the great writers. While composition courses tend to provide examples from academic writing, a modern rhetoric course would include selections from Aristotle, Cicero, Shakespeare, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Susan Sontag, Martin Luther King Jr., and Joan Didion. Students engage with and learn from the best prose and oration humanity has produced.
The second reason: teaching rhetoric is identical to teaching students how to think. It summons the faculties of the whole mind. The human brain is not always thinking like a refrigerator runs—thinking is a special creative and critical act that must be trained and practiced. Composition courses focus on argumentation developed under a thesis, appealing largely to logic. Rhetoric teaches students all three main kinds of rhetorical appeal—not just logical but ethical and emotional.
The third reason: rhetoric is both critical and creative. It engages students' own interests and beliefs by asking them to respond to issues of their own times. Instead of quantitative assignments like five-page papers, rhetoric assigns qualitative work—students must deliver a three-minute speech on pressing civil concerns like climate change, voting rights, or public health. They must persuade a skeptical audience using rhetorical appeals under time constraints, exercising quick reasoning and creativity that are communicable workforce skills.
The fourth reason: there is a creative element in practicing rhetoric. Each meeting could be split evenly with one half lecture and analysis of great prose, the other half individual or collaborative exercises. Drawing on readings and lecture material, students can craft short satirical pieces in the imitation of Alexander Pope addressing contemporary absurdities. This engages what Frederick Schiller called the play drive—enlisting creativity toward composition. Imitation used to be a large part of rhetoric for centuries; Benjamin Franklin learned to write by copying out the Spectator essays by Addison and Steele.
The fifth reason: rhetoric furnishes students with the tools and formulas of good writing. The daunting blank page is what often sends students to AI tools. Rhetoric provides a list of common topics—for example, many different ways of beginning an essay and developing its message. There's comparison in which two or more things are compared by similarity, difference, or degree. There's the topic of relationship through cause and effect, contraries, and contradictions. There's testimony including statistics or quotations from authorities.
There are also schemes and tropes—a scheme is the ordering of a sentence in which students practice shaping thought into formulas. Students would learn anti metaboly, the repetition of words in reverse order. A famous example: eat to live, not live to eat—each word mirrors the other. In-class work could require applying these schemes and using several topics, graded not by length but by quality of argumentation.
Counterarguments
Critics might note that returning to rhetoric alone won't solve the immediate challenge of artificial intelligence-generated text. Detection tools have proven unreliable, and simply changing what students learn won't prevent them from seeking shortcuts when overwhelmed by workload pressures. The shift proposed also assumes institutions will invest in training faculty for entirely different approaches—a costly proposition with uncertain outcomes.
Bottom Line
The strongest thread running through this argument is that technology has merely exposed a problem that was already present: higher education abandoned the art of genuine communication in favor of mechanical proficiency. The vulnerability lies in whether universities can actually implement these changes, given current budget constraints and the sheer inertia of academic bureaucracies. But the core insight remains valuable—before chasing detection methods, institutions should ask what they're actually teaching students to say.