More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

by John Warner

A veteran writing teacher makes a “moving” (Rick Wormeli) argument that writing is a form of thinking and feeling and shows why it can’t be replaced by AI

In the age of artificial intelligence, drafting an essay is as simple as typing a prompt and pressing enter. What does this mean for the art of writing? According to longtime writing teacher John not very much.

More Than Words argues that generative AI programs like ChatGPT not only can kill the student essay but should, since these assignments don’t challenge students to do the real work of writing. To Warner, writing is thinking—discovering your ideas while trying to capture them on a page—and feeling—grappling with what it fundamentally means to be human. The fact that we ask students to complete so many assignments that a machine could do is a sign that something has gone very wrong with writing instruction. More Than Words calls for us to use AI as an opportunity to reckon with how we work with words—and how all of us should rethink our relationship with writing.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Artificial Intelligence, Education, Teaching, Technology, Language

267 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 4, 2025

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name

Reviews

[Ken]

A great primer on what in hell "AI" is and, most importantly, isn't. With decades of experience as a college writing instructor, Warner's been there and back -- and now THIS. Any teacher of writing at any grade level can relate, as generative AI has become a major problem. Yet another mess, as if education wasn't dealing with enough brushfires.

First off, Warner sides with those who dislike the term "artificial intelligence" because, well, there's nothing intelligent about it. Warner and others prefer to call it for what it is: automation. That's all, really. It spits out based on data that's pumped in, and while Warner tries hard to find uses for it in education and even plays with the automation in many ways himself, he's hard pressed to give it much beyond minor tasks to make our lives easier.

Why? Because writing is thinking and AI doesn't think. Because writing is feeling emotion and AI doesn't feel emotions and cannot reflect. Because writing is quirky at times and provides a snapshot of who we are through voice, and if there's one thing a machine based on algorithms cannot do, it's provide much in the way of voice.

It stands to reason, then, if writers use AI to generate writing, they are denying themselves the process of writing, thinking, feeling. You know, all the stuff that makes us HUMAN. And if they sneak it by their instructors, they are winning battles in a war they are sure to lose because, sooner or late, what they never learned by doing will be exposed.

I like telling students using generative AI to write papers for you is like watching workout videos on YouTube to get in shape. Good luck with that!

Diving even deeper, Warner warns us that it's the Musk-type 1%-ers who stand to make billions on this. The Zuckerberg types who ditch fact checks and create algorithms that reward extreme voices on both sides of the political divide (and the country be damned!) on FaceBook or Meta or whatever it's now called. What's more, creating infrastructure to build and support bigger and bigger AI facilities in rural areas (they need space) is having a huge effect on the environment (if anyone cares), especially water supply (and good luck to farmers in the same county).

Bleak, but revealing. Warner ends with advice under the categories of "Resist," "Renew," and "Explore." If everyone takes this as fait accompli and sits on their hands, it will only grow into a problem that can no longer be tangled with. Sound familiar? The same problem seems to exist politically in the sharply divided States of America (in fairness, I removed the "United"). It's act, or bear the consequences of doing nothing while everything goes to hell in a generative handbasket.

[Wouter · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Rather than seeing ChatGPT as a threat that will destroy things of value, we should be viewing it as an opportunity to reconsider exactly what we value and why we value those things."

More than Words goes the beyond the instrument of AI. It explores what human writing makes it human what problems AI content has. It is critical yet not pessimistic. It focuses on writing as a thinking process, and how valuable this is.

As a teacher this books helped keeping focus on my primary task: making students more critical, more knowledgeable, and more independent. I highly recommend it to teachers in any field and other people to get a better understanding of the value of reading and writing not supported by AI.

[Luke VanHouten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being an extremely persuasive critique of the use of generative AI to supplant the writing process, Warner's book details why we write and why writing is thinking, feeling, and living. LLMs can do none of these things; they simply process and output syntax. Writing at its highest levels will not be replaced by AI (and it may even benefit from it), but its negative impact on writing pedagogy has been immediate. Students and teachers alike should know when the reject LLM usage, when to renew more human forms of learning and teaching how to write, and when generative AI may be something worth exploring. Warner—a prolific editor and teacher of writing—makes confident arguments for all of these. This is a must read for any writer or teacher.

[Genevieve Brassard · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5: I wish this book could be required reading for all the administrators and faculty blindly falling for AI without stopping to consider the wider ramifications of wide adoption in classrooms because “it’s here and it’s the future” etc. Writing is thinking is being human, and what’s the point of a college education if we outsource human tasks to machines? Also love the idea of replacing the term artificial intelligence with “automation,” a more accurate descriptor of what Chat-GPT is and does.

[Josh Nisley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Warner is one of the most consistently sensible and humane voices in writing studies that I know of—and he was that even before AI. He understands the craft in a deep way and it shows.

As an admitted nonbeliever, his framework for action seems hamstrung by the enervated Enlightenment-liberal anthropology that sustains it: economic security + freedom to pursue one’s interests (as long it does not harm anyone) = the best version of the good life we can all agree on (228). I sense him pushing toward something more substantive, which he finds in Wendell Berry’s idea of creatureliness. I guess incarnational anthropology by proxy is better than nothing.

[Kyle C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agreed with a lot of the content of this book but I had hoped it would offer more specific and structured pedagogical advice. It is more of a general manifesto on AI than a how-to guide, with a sprawling range of topics: the ethics of the tech industry, the corporate interests that underpin these innovations, the environmental impacts of AI, the history of technology in education, the proliferation of AI forgeries, the manipulation of search engines with AI, the narrow market for struggling authors, and Warner's own theories of writing pedagogy. The book offers a number of useful admonitions on AI: it is not, first of all, a genuine form of "intelligence" but rather "syntactic automation," generating words and stringing together plausible sentences into a probabilistic response; it doesn't simply "hallucinate," as we often hear—in fact, all AI output is an hallucination, a mindless assemblage of words according to stochastic calculations of tokens rather than through any deep reasoning or reflective process; whether its claims happen to be true or false, it is a "bullshitter", unable to verify or validate itself; however intelligent its words seem, it is always us readers who make sense of its automated language and project intelligence onto it. Therefore, Warner argues, if AI is able to do the task, then maybe that is not a task that humans ought to be doing to begin with. This is the philosophy that animates his whole view of AI and teaching: new developments in AI present us with an opportunity to reassess what writing really is and what thinking is truly valuable. In this, John Warner returns to his earlier writing instruction books, arguing that writing is not strictly about grammatical fluency or formulaic structure but, most fundamentally, writing is thinking. It requires deep thought, experience and expertise, judgement and reflection. Writing is more than the template five-paragraph essay.

Here and there I found some interesting and illustrative exercises. Discussing the outrage and fallout that ensued after Vanderbilt University issued an AI-generated condolence letter in the wake of a campus shooting, Warner picks apart AI's thoughtless boilerplate language. Asking ChatGPT to produce a condolence letter, he notes its platitudes about "incredible losses" (which are quite credible nowadays), and the "unimaginable grief and pain" (which, for the affected community, doesn't need to be imagined at all). I myself was startled by the absurdly, callously, sing-song writing (the alliterative "heavy hearts" and the "terrible tragedy" that has "befallen our beloved campus"; the excessively ornamental tricolons in "we encourage you to lean on one another for strength, comfort, and solace" and "we understand the collective shock, sorrow, and anger"). The flourishes feel out of place for such a sombre situation. The letter is shockingly vacuous ("the loss is an irreplaceable voice in our academic family"—how can a void be replaceable or irreplaceable?). Warner shows the unfeeling way AI generates rhetorically artificial prose and simulates a banal form of hollow commiseration. The loss of life is a pathos beyond words, and it is a revelatory experiment to see how AI manages this particular kind inexpressible horror—one that cows politicians with meager words of "thoughts and prayers". AI just produces rinky-dink phrases and school-boy oratory.

Another part I found interesting was his "right word, almost-right word" exercise: essentially, the teacher chooses a passage from a text (in his case, a paragraph from an essay by David Foster Wallace) and invites students to think about how a sentence would sound if a single word was replaced (imagine, for example, if he wrote the more humdrum "smell of skin" instead of the more grotesque "smell of flesh"). Asking ChatGPT to imitate a passage, Warner effectively shows the difference between virtuosic writing and soulless pastiche. David Foster Wallace's piece is evocative, even disgusting in parts, a text designed to elicit visceral reactions; the AI imitation is just an artless mimicry leaving no impact, similar syntax but without the strikingly idiosyncratic word choices. I learned a lot from this moment and I would have liked to see Warner discuss more of his own classroom exercises and talk through the demonstrable weaknesses of AI.

When I first read the title, I had thought it would offer more writing assignments and dissect more shortcomings of AI prose (and students' perceptions of AI prose). Instead, Warner zooms out and advocates for a big-picture ethical posture to AI—to resist utopian thinking and tech determinism; to renew our sense of humanity and the value of our own thoughts, experiences and creativity; and, finally, to explore AI, researching it, seeking out different opinions, not for the sake of personal efficiency but as an act of public service, trying to understand a consequential technology and its impacts on society.

[Tarin Shay]

I would recommend this book to anyone who writes for fun, or for work, or who is in academia. Or who has had existential dread about AI. I usually shy away from tech book since they are dated so quickly, but Warner does a good job addressing this qualm. His argument that ChatGPT cannot read or write (rather process text and fetch words, respectively) hit the mark for me. That writing and reading are uniquely human activities (connected to thoughts, emotions, experiences) so AI just cannot do the same.
He is not doomsday about AI, rather he sees it as an opportunity for a reckoning about what makes us human and what types of writing are actually worth doing.

[Lora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just what I was looking for.

Not tips and tricks to use in class (though I dug out some of that, too), but rather a way to think and talk about AI and when to use it: AFTER the thinking drafting process.

re-read for a class.

[Ben Vore · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If a student comes to me with a text that has been generated by an AI, we have nothing to talk about, because we cannot discuss what it is they want to say, because they have yet to say anything."

John Warner writes this in the back half of More Than Words, and it's a useful entry point into his general philosophy on generative AI as it relates to student writing, the same lens I use when thinking about ChatGPT and the like. Warner, like me, is generally an AI skeptic. If writing is thinking, feeling, and a practice (he devotes a chapter each to arguing these three things in Part Two of this book), then "only humans write," he argues.

I underlined many sentences from this part. For example: "What I want to say about writing is that it is a fully embodied experience. When we do it, we are thinking and feeling. We are bringing our unique intelligences to the table and attempting to demonstrate them to the world, even when our intelligences don't seem too intelligent. ChatGPT is the opposite, a literal averaging of intelligences, a featureless landscape of pattern-derived text."

And this, after Vanderbilt University put out a ChatGPT-aided statement -- that dreaded "institutional condolence email" -- following a mass shooting at Michigan State in 2023: "Outsourcing expression following tragedy to tools of automation is the kind of thing that happens in a faceless dystopia." Warner then asks ChatGPT to draft another statement and prints it in full, commenting "If we are going to resist this benumbing, we must be mindful that writing is feeling, and if nothing is felt when we are writing, we are missing an opportunity to connect to our own humanity."

As a teacher of writing, though, Warner wrestles with when and how to implement A.I. in his own instruction as well as how to help students think about generative A.I. He contends that ChatGPT is "not a threat but an opportunity" -- a chance for educators to reevaluate the kind of writing we ask of our students. "ChatGPT is not threatening anything meaningful," he argues, "because it is not capable of producing any output that conveys meaning. If we want students to produce meaningful work, let's go ahead and do that."

I don't agree with everything Warner says here (though I would've loved for him to go off even more on the stupidity of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-Hour Rule), but he frames the underlying principles of generative A.I. in helpful and clarifying ways. More Than Words is a useful corrective to what I have found to be the general attitude among educators who do not work directly with students, which is that A.I. is both "inevitable" (suggesting resistance is futile and skeptics are Luddites) and a tool that should be celebrated and embraced, mainly to become more "efficient." I went to a professional development session led by a college instructor who played an A.I. song she'd "created" and showed us a children's book she'd had A.I. illustrate about her son and his filmmaking talents. Most of my peers thought this was cool. Ask virtually any teenager and they will tell you it is anything but; A.I. slop is still slop.

Summarizing the embrace-or-die ethos of tech accelerationists like Marc Andreesen and Sam Altman ("It's worth noting that the main criteria for being considered an expert inside [this] movement is enormous wealth," Warner quips), Warner writes, "We are people. Large language models will always be machines. To declare the machines superior means believing that what makes humans human is inherently inferior." More Than Words is wise and helpful in that it recognizes what LLMs will never be able to replicate or replace, and points towards ways of thinking, writing, and teaching that will survive the coming disruption.

[Jacob Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

a true “preaching to the choir” read, but I appreciate Warner’s ability to give specific definitions to a general feeling of “AI bad” that I’ve been feeling the last few years as a teacher (and human).

I specifically think the point of centering the individual rather than “the average” is hugely important. a human’s job is not efficiency and optimization; our job is to fart around and find our community, to trust that anything worth doing is worth the time it takes to do.

[Sarah Krajewski · Rating 5 out of 5]

“My students have been incentivized to not write but instead to produce writing-related simulations, formulaic responses for the purpose of passing standardized assessments. This happens not because teachers are bad or students lack the ability but because these simulations have been privileged in a system where ‘schooling’ is divorced from ‘learning.’” In today’s world, most American public school students have been denied the process of writing: the creativity, play, and wonder. In this book, Warner shares how A.I. threatens to destroy this, but shares that there is a way to make sure that doesn’t happen. He states, “writing is an embodied acting of thinking and feeling,” which A.I. cannot do. So, actually, ChatGPT and other chatbots are “bullshitters.” Writing is thinking, and A.I. cannot review, remember, or think at all. Warner reminds us that, if ChatGPT and other chatbots like it can generate work students are asked to created, we teacher need to rethink how we teach writing. It should involve practice, yes, but also imagination, play, and fun.


So much to love about this book! As a teacher of writing, I found myself applauding so much of what Warner shares. If we teachers think about the way writing should be taught, A.I. becomes a little gnat. A slight annoying issue that can easily be flicked away. A necessary read for ALL teachers of writing.

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent read for anyone who writes regularly or teaches writing. Warner’s theory causes a close examination and potential overhaul of how we’ve been teaching an assessing writing: if ChatGPT can do it, it’s probably not worth doing.

Anyone who writes understands that the finished product defines a process that is unique, messy, individual, gritty, overwhelming…and ChatGPT’s ability to spit out a finished piece or perfect syntax is not writing. It is processing.

4/5 because some of the insight about algorithms seemed a little off track and off focus. Ultimately a great read that I’d recommend!

[Cheyenne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This tackles the issue of AI from a number of directions. As an instructor, I read it wanting to learn how I might prevent students from using ChatGPT to complete essays (or even how to convince them that using it for that purpose is a detriment to their own cognition). Ultimately there is no clear answer, but it is clear that instructors have to move past urging students to complete formulaic essays that ChatGPT can churn out in three seconds. I would have liked more suggestions but it is an excellent jumping off point.

[Rachael · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s a great balance between theory and practice in this. I particularly liked the lists that broke down how to create an AI free (or at least AI reduced) environment in the classroom.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I needed this book. After years now of think pieces and trainings and webinars and discussions about the inevitability of AI and what it means for reading and writing that left me questioning my field, its work, its future, Warner’s book offered me something I have been looking for. Yes, it helps that he and I are, if not on the same page, at least in the same page range on these topics, but even without that, the questions he raises are some that I think have gotten lost in all of the noise of the bigger public conversations about generative AI.

[Kierstin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Preaching to the choir on this one. I’ve been saying that if your school courses can be undermined by AI then there is something wrong with your courses, which Warner agrees and suggests is the result of years of standardization being the only metric used to judge students. Unfortunately AI is MUCH better as standardization than humans. ‘My students had been incentivized not to write but instead to produce writing related simulations, formulaic responses for the purpose of passing standardized assessments. This happens not because teachers are bad or students lack ability but because these simulations have been privileged in a system where “schooling” is divorced from “learning.”’

[Brian Longtin · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you follow the ever-present news coverage of AI's march to dominance, nothing here might strike you as totally new or groundbreaking. But as a comprehensive examination through the lens of what it means to read, to write, and to think, it does provide a useful rubric for judging how, when and why we should (and mostly shouldn't) use AI to replace our own intellectual lives and learning practice.

[America Grelinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book on AI and the truths we aren't told. I enjoyed the break down onto 4 parts and felt Warner did a great job keeping it timely and precise.

The amount of water and electric consumption is disheartening to say the least. I hope we can share this knowledge within our English classes as well as with the general population-- to write is to think. AI should never replace this. We must remain diligent and fight to maintain our human rights in the classroom.

[Illysa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Witty and insightful, I absolutely loved this book. It helped crystallize some of the more nebulous ideas of my dissertation. I also laughed out loud several times, because Warner is very much my sense of humor. Ordered more of his books and subscribed to his Substack!

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for anyone who cares at all about reading, writing, or education.

[Cori Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full of insight and wisdom. I hope I can turn it into a good classroom experience.

[Tabitha Zangre · Rating 5 out of 5]

EVERYONE should read this book. Especially teachers.

[Sean Deegan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good reminders. AI is a huge obstacle and a pain to detect. Keeping me engaged and thinking about how to defeat it. Or work around it. Or just do everything on paper 🙃

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good. Helpful to this writing teacher trying to resist and keep writing human.

[Sara Shocks · Rating 4 out of 5]

great summary + analysis of the shortcomings of not only "AI" but also how writing and thinking are valued in education and workplace settings

[Atharva · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting book talking about what writing actually is, and why it can't be replaced by AI. The core argument is that writing is an embodied activity where you express and understand your own thoughts and feelings as you do it: the text is just the medium. Therefore, text generated by ChatGPT cannot quality as writing since AI cannot have thoughts and feelings. Arranging text != writing, which is a process, and not an output.

He poses some interesting questions about writing pedagogy, particularly around high school essays. If AI can generate a passable high school essay, is it really worth doing? Does this process actually help students engage in embodied writing that brings out thoughts and feelings? Warner answers the questions with strong "nos", and I agree. The last few sections were about how to think critically about integrating AI into our lives, but I felt like they were more like gestures rather than clear claims and recommendations.

[Michael Neal · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like the first half of the book. It’s a thoughtful and clever explanation of AI from the perspective of a former writing instructor. I thought some points were oversimplified, but it’s written to a general audience. I felt, though, that the second half of the book wandered some and then ended with an apologetic whimper, wishing for a world without AI. The final framework—resist, renew, explore—had potential, but they were all minimal and unenthusiastic. Still, I found this a quick and interesting read. The funny stories and charm alone make it accessible and memorable.

[Dargan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this era of AI hype or panic, it was nice to read a take that was skeptical, but felt balanced. I’m fairly familiar with what’s going on in the world of AI, so I didn’t learn a ton about it from this book, but I enjoyed reading Warner’s thoughts about what makes writing valuable and deeply human. He put into words a lot of the concerns I have about generative AI as someone who has spent my whole career working with words. He also made a great case for the value of humans continuing to write, even if it’s a struggle. I’ve worked in the world of online content for a while and have lost the joy of writing. Reading this reminded me of why I used to love to write and made me want to carve out some time to do more creative writing.

[Tanya · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought I was going to be reading a book about how to think about writing in the Age of AI, and I am a teacher and a fan of Ethan Mollick’s work. This book is mostly why-AI-is-bad.

[Marie Bagdanov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this slowly for school and got paid to read it! Imagine that. I highly recommend all teachers read this (and anyone honestly). Though Warner doesn’t provide classroom ready solutions perse, he challenges how fast we’ve moved in bringing AI in the classroom. We are human creatures and writing is thinking. How we make meaning. The good life isn’t valued by proficiency or efficiency. We need to give students opportunities to find their “tastes” and enter into authentic dialogue with peers. This is where learning happens and we cannot outsource this process to AI. Strong argument to call AI as “automation” not “intelligence.” Warner is definitely against AI, but doesn’t throw it out the window entirely. He put words to the feeling in my gut I’ve been having as an ELA teacher.