On Feb. 23, I got an email notifying me that I had been removed from my institution’s Grammarly account. This change had been announced earlier this month; the Campus Digest from Feb. 6 included a short blurb from the Center for Information Technology reading  “Campus Grammarly Subscription Discontinued.” The announcement went on to advise students who would like writing support to pay a visit to the Writing Center. As The Oberlin Review reported on Feb. 6, the decision was made partly because of Grammarly’s recent turn toward AI and text-generating features. Like many other writing platforms, Grammarly has recently begun to advertise itself not only as a grammar-correction tool, but also as a writing aid. You can use Grammarly to check grammar and syntax, adjust tone, enhance vocabulary, evaluate readability, and, as of April 2023, Grammarly will even write text for you. Obviously, this is a problem for an American GPA-based institution. Asking something else to write for you is cheating, whether it be another student or a Large Language Model like ChatGPT. However, getting rid of the Grammarly subscription reveals a broader disconnect between what department leaders think writing is for and what students think writing is for. If the distance between these trains of thought goes unaddressed for any longer, Oberlin will see its writing programs begin to fail.

Don’t get me wrong: Oberlin’s Writing Center is undoubtedly a valuable asset to the students of the College. However, it is a mistake to direct students who were using Grammarly to the Writing Center, because the Writing Center doesn’t do what Grammarly does. The Writing Center believes writing is a mode of thinking. This is why the Writing Center does not offer proofreading or editing services. The Writing Center’s core values assert that “everyone is capable of contributing to the academic conversation in a meaningful way,” that they “embrace language differences, and the interpersonal communication strategies that navigating these differences requires;” and that “learning occurs best in dynamic, social, and embodied spaces, where knowledge production thrives on collective as well as individual effort.” These kinds of core values all get at the same general point: The Writing Center, following the pedagogical footsteps of the Writing and Communications department, aims to deconstruct the narrative that there is one correct way to write. I believe that this deconstruction is valuable. Too much focus on grammar and syntax can detract from a piece of writing’s ability to communicate. If students were falling into the trap of letting Grammarly write and, by extension, think for them, the Writing Center would be a great place to combat that. However, students who were using Grammarly to catch syntactic and grammatical errors still need a proofreading tool because it is essential to use correct syntax and grammar in the professional world.

If we take a step back from the ideological notion that writing is simply a tool for thinking, learning, and communicating, it becomes clear that producing and maintaining pieces of writing  is also a requirement for entering the workplace. The purpose of writing a resume or a cover letter isn’t to use writing as a thinking process, but to use writing to advertise yourself. Any kind of professional writing, whether it’s a workplace communication or it’s being published in academia, must be written in accordance with its appropriate style guide. I’m afraid that de-emphasizing the importance of the more mundane language rules will leave Oberlin students at a disadvantage when it comes time for them to enter the job market as compared to other college graduates. Comma placement and the odd misspelling may not seem like practices worth our time, but the more we practice that style of writing, the more automatic it becomes. If our departments feel that syntax and grammar isn’t worth focusing on, then they should encourage the use of tools that can detect those errors for us. That’s what machines are for.

I like that the Writing and Communication classes I’ve taken so far have emphasized how writing is a conversation. However, I don’t think that the way to walk forward in the age of AI is to cut out any machine input in writing. If we are making a choice to decenter the rules of writing that have to do with rote memorization, I’m all for it. Let’s use machines to do the work that isn’t as important to our pedagogy. I think it is a mistake, though, to pretend that all of a student’s needs can be met through the Writing Center or another collaborative workspace. We live in a fast-paced world. If we want to make changes in it, we have to be able to keep up.