Teaching Writing in the Digital Age

Teaching writing has long been considered a central aim of the high school English language arts classroom. Yet what counts as composing has shifted rapidly over the past three decades. Despite periodic collaborative efforts between secondary and postsecondary educators, persistent questions remain about the kinds of knowledge and skills students actually need when they arrive in college writing courses, and the kinds of writing they have meaningfully practiced in high school classrooms. These longstanding inquiries have intensified with the rapid emergence of digitally-mediated technologies, which have enabled new forms of composing in online spaces, changing the way people consume and create media and participate in modern society.

Among the most consequential of these developments is the rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), through which composing has become mediated by systems capable of drafting, paraphrasing, imitating style, and synthesizing sources on demand. These tools have disrupted seemingly settled understandings of the core concepts in the teaching of writing, including authorship, agency, originality, and evidence of learning. Secondary English teachers and college professors face an existential crisis as we reimagine what the teaching of writing, providing feedback, and assessing learning might look like in this new era. In this essay, we examine how these changes have contributed to the ways in which incoming college freshmen often write below, or at least outside, the expectations set by college-level English professors. We aim to encourage university professors to develop realistic expectations for their students and to foster a deeper understanding of the aims and challenges of writing instruction in secondary education, especially in the digital age.

Our thinking about these shifts in composing practices is informed by our current or emeritus roles as faculty members in a School of Education, and as former public high school English teachers. Having spent decades inhabiting both the high school context and university context, we are well aware of what Feiman-Nemser and Buchmann term the two-worlds pitfall, that is, the chasm between progressive universities and staid schools tied to conservative traditions. Yet in our own work, we have found that there are multiple worlds pulling each teacher in different, often irreconcilable directions in both schools and universities. These competing forces include beliefs about teaching writing grounded in opposing philosophical traditions, such as the formalist tradition focused on fidelity to rules and conventions and the generative tradition that values writing as a tool for learning.

These conflicts can occur between high school English and college English, and what is taught and valued in each. These competing values are often available within high school and university settings as well. The chasm was evident in a course Lindy recently taught for graduate students preparing to become high school English teachers. During a class discussion on exploring various approaches to teaching writing in high school classrooms, the students reported that their transition from high school to college writing was highly challenging. Several noted that the transition felt "traumatizing" and that they shed "many tears" as they undertook the process of understanding discipline-specific expectations for writing in English courses, particularly for long-form essays focused on literary analysis.

These students reported that although they had performed well in their AP Language and AP Literature courses and considered themselves to be competent writers, their earlier self-confidence quickly eroded after they began receiving feedback on their writing from English professors. These students reported that expectations for writing at the high school and college levels differed substantially. They felt that feedback from professors was often "harsh" or "not specific." But, over time they came to understand the discipline's expectations, often citing 1-2 specific professors who provided concrete, supportive feedback as a turning point in their trajectories.

Historical, social, political, and institutional forces shape the teaching of writing within high school classrooms. Since the Enlightenment, Western academic traditions have emphasized rational, evidence-based argumentation, thereby narrowing the range of genres considered legitimate in educational contexts. In U.S. high schools, the five-paragraph essay has dominated writing instruction since the mid-twentieth century, serving as a standardized template for organizing ideas. Teachers frequently perpetuate this model as a result of their own apprenticeship of observation, relying on the formulaic writing instruction they previously received. Although such structures can provide scaffolding that student writers may (or may not) transfer to new and longer forms, over-reliance on them may leave students inadequately prepared for the diversity of genres and disciplinary conventions encountered in higher education. In the context of GenAI, which can easily replicate formulaic argumentative structures, the continued reliance on restrictive writing models raises critical questions about the kinds of thinking, agency, and rhetorical adaptability being imposed on students.

High school writing instruction takes place within high-stakes accountability systems that subject student writing to standardized, often formulaic, assessment rather than to criteria appropriate for expansive conceptions of literacy. Schools are continually shaped by repeated assessments that consume time, resources, and instructional attention. These assessments and their high-stakes consequences often drive instruction. Teacher job security is frequently linked to student test performance, which encourages educators to emphasize test preparation over the development of students' critical thinking and creativity. Standardized tests typically assess students' abilities to answer multiple-choice questions based on short reading passages, reinforcing a narrow instructional focus. Many states require that students pass a writing test graded according to a rubric based on the five-paragraph theme, strongly suggesting that teachers ought to teach it and little else, no matter how unpersuasive such essays might be.

In addition to the problems of assessment created by the Common Core State Standards, Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, and other external means of controlling curriculum and instruction, many districts have developed their own tests. These might be "gateway" exams that determine if an 8th grader can enter high school, or "end of course" tests that are uniform across all teachers and schools in a district, or exams through which admissions to certain classes are determined, or other means of replacing the judgment of teachers with a "standardized" exam that presumably transcends subjectivity and provides the "real" assessment of students' progress. As a result, high school writing is often shaped less by evolving theories of literacy than by the logistical and political demands of assessment.

Another factor contributing to the gap between high school preparation and college-level expectations is the preparation of English teachers themselves. Historically, English teacher education has remained literature-centered, often privileging literary pedagogy over writing instruction. As a result, many preservice teachers receive limited formal preparation in how to teach writing as a process involving revision, genre awareness, attention to discourse communities, and rhetorical decision-making. This preparation intersects with a longstanding curricular stability in literature study within high school English classrooms, where writing is frequently positioned as a means of demonstrating comprehension according to conventional standards, or undertaking analysis typically aligned with received critical wisdom, rather than as a creative response or composition independent of literary reading.

As a result, relatively little instructional time is devoted to extended writing. Observational research indicates that only 7.7% of classroom time is spent on writing, only 1.6% of assignments exceed the length of a five-paragraph essay, and even in highly ranked AP and International Baccalaureate programs, 40% of students report never completing a sustained, research-based essay. These issues are so entrenched that researchers have seen little need to update the findings from these earlier studies. Another challenge in high school writing instruction is that grammar is often taught in isolation, a problem noted through over a century of research. When students learn grammar only as a set of rules removed from the contexts of usage, they are less likely to see grammatical choices as tools for their writing and are thus less likely to build the flexible linguistic repertoires required for college-level writing. In fact, studying grammar as a stand-alone subject has had no demonstrated effect on speaking or writing according to established conventions. If anything, it occupies instructional time that would be better spent on learning procedures for how to write in relation to readers' expectations. Such attention to grammar overlooks the work of linguists who are concerned with situational or cultural speech genres and conventions rather than a static, universal "standard" form of the language.

At the very moment writing instruction is being standardized and constrained with formal schooling, students are encountering new composing possibilities beyond a text's formal properties. A persistent disconnect exists between the predominantly alphabetic, linear texts assigned in schools for a single academic audience and the diverse, multimodal literacies students develop in their personal lives, particularly through digital media. Although multimodal composing has historically been central to human expression, from ancient cave art to developments in art, architecture, and design, recent technological advancements, including the ubiquity of smart phones, have enabled people to compose across modes for a variety of purposes and audiences as they create social media posts, visual narratives, and other multimedia projects. Despite extensive research highlighting the benefits of writing for authentic audiences beyond the classroom, universities have continued to emphasize traditional print-based writing submitted to and read by a single reader, the teacher or professor, thereby maintaining a disconnect between students' out-of-school literacies and the forms of writing recognized as legitimate in higher education.

Digitally mediated composing practices can create new opportunities for artistic expression and civic engagement, particularly for young people whose interests, strengths, or cultural repertoires are not always well served by traditional print-based school assignments. In online spaces, young writers often experiment in rhetorically sophisticated ways as they negotiate their identities through exchanges with authentic audiences and the affective dynamics of online interactions. These practices can also produce tangible social outcomes. While high school-aged youth have frequently led movements for social change, schools have rarely served as supportive environments for fostering activist consciousness, with current policies working against progressive activism in any form. However, many young people (and older ones) engage in digital activism by advocating for young people with undocumented status, engaging in peer-to-peer learning about social movements, including human rights, and pushing back against the over policing of their schools. But online participation can also expose young people to cyberbullying, harassment, and surveillance. Social media have also been criticized for addictive features that monetize young people's attention, fragmenting attention and making sustained focus that long-form writing requires more challenging. In spite of these complications, including cell phone bans designed to refocus students' attention on schoolwork, online communities continue to shape students' sense of propriety, content, and form, undermining the idea that school should promote those literacies that have undergirded curriculum, instruction, and assessment in schools for many generations.

High school students' lack of practice in long-form writing may be further compounded by their growing reliance on GenAI tools. These tools allow high school students easy access to resources that may elide the need to think critically or generate their own ideas. A recent study found that 26% of U.S. teens (ages 13-17) reported using ChatGPT for schoolwork, a doubling from 13% in 2023 and perhaps only a precursor of things to come. This concern continues into higher education, where college students, graduate students, faculty, and administrators face similar challenges. However, the effects of Gen AI on learning and development, especially on adolescents, remain unsettled. Recent research conducted among adults 18 years and older found that using ChatGPT to write essays improved efficiency but also weakened memory and self-monitoring, leading to cognitive debt. Using brainwave assessments, researchers found that ChatGPT users did not perform as well as non-users at the neural, language, and behavioral levels. These results suggest that relying on tools like ChatGPT could have long-term educational effects and that more research is needed to understand how using GenAI tools affects learning. As many schools and universities race to embrace AI under the banner of innovation and efficiency, English teachers and professors should critically evaluate such integration and require robust evidence of the impacts of GenAI tools on students' long-term writing and learning development.

Conclusion

A specter is an apparition that produces terror, fear, and dread. We hope we have helped our Department of English colleagues see less of a specter and more of the complex, sometimes contradictory, and typically under-resourced educational settings that shape writing instruction in high school English classrooms. The task of teaching writing has grown both more challenging and more significant with the advent of digital writing tools such as GenAI. High school classrooms now serve as critical sites where educational, technological, and institutional factors intersect. We see promise in the potential of collaboration between high school teachers and university English professors to enhance understanding of how digital tools and GenAI collectively influence students' writing development over time.

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Lindy L. Johnson is the Robert D. and Patricia Lee Pavey Family Chair in Instructional Technology, Associate Professor of English Education and Chair of the Curriculum & Instruction Department at William & Mary. She is also co-director of the Center for Innovation in Learning Design. Her research draws on sociocultural theories of mediated action (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1991) and social semiotic theories of multimodality (Jewitt & Kress, 2003) to investigate the increasingly multimodal nature of digital technologies, and the emerging social practices and activities that arise from these technologies. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D. in language and literacy from the University of Georgia, she taught high school English in Boston Public Schools.

Peter Smagorinsky is Distinguished Research Professor, Department of Language and Literacy Education at The University of Georgia, emeritus; and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Universidad de Guadalajara. His research and teaching take a cultural-historical approach to issues of literacy education and related social concerns. Recent awards include the 2020 Horace Mann League Outstanding Public Educator Award, 2022 AERA Exemplary Research in Teaching and Teacher Education Award, 2023 AERA Cultural Historical Research SIG Lifetime Contribution Award, and election to the National Academy of Education in 2023. He was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame in 2024.