Has AI made writing instruction obsolete? If students can enter a prompt into a large language model and get back a polished essay almost instantaneously, can’t they just edit it without having to slog through the basics of composition?
That would be nice. Writing is hard. The most recent national data we have—from 2011—showed that only 27 percent of 8th and 12th graders wrote at the proficient level or above (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). As with most education benchmarks, the situation has likely only gotten worse in the aftermath of the pandemic.
But writing isn’t just a product you can outsource to a device with no consequences. Ideally, it’s a learning process that can lead to new insights and deeper understandings. If you subcontract out that process, you miss out on a lot of learning.
In fact, studies show that when writers rely on AI, they experience what some have dubbed “metacognitive laziness” (Fan et al., 2025). One MIT study found that when people used ChatGPT to write an essay, their brain connectivity was weaker than that of those who relied on their own resources (Kosmyna et al., 2025). They were also less able to quote from essays they had “written” just minutes before.
Writing isn’t just a product you can outsource to a device with no consequences.
We also have evidence that writing can yield cognitive benefits. A 2011 meta-analysis found that writing about a text enhances students’ understanding of it (Graham & Hebert, 2011). Another in 2020 found that writing about content across the curriculum—in science, social studies, and math—improves learning at all grade levels (Graham et al., 2020).
Why can writing have this effect? For one thing, when we explain information in our own words it becomes both stickier and easier to retrieve when we need it (Wexler, 2024). That’s what we do when we write.
In addition, writing can serve as a form of what cognitive scientists call “elaboration.” Asking and answering questions like why, how, and what’s an example have been found to deepen comprehension, while also boosting retention of information (Endres et al., 2024). Those are the kinds of questions we deal with when we write, if we’re writing well.
Writing can also develop the kinds of abilities we try to foster through reading comprehension instruction. If you’ve learned how to write a coherent paragraph with a good topic sentence, you’ve learned how to find the main idea and supporting details in a powerful way.
Yet another benefit of writing is that it can familiarize students with the complex syntax of written language, a frequently overlooked and significant barrier to reading comprehension (Wexler, 2026). Many sentence structures that appear frequently in text, like subordinating conjunctions and the passive voice, are rarely used in conversation. If students learn how to use those structures in their own writing, they’re in a far better position to understand them when they encounter them in their reading.
Helping Students Get Past the Difficulty
There’s a big catch, though: writing, as I mentioned before, is hard. For inexperienced writers, the task of writing can be so cognitively overwhelming that it leaves no room for the learning benefits writing can provide. The 2020 meta-analysis that found benefits, on average, to writing across the curriculum also found that in 18 percent of the studies, writing led to less learning. The studies can’t definitively tell us why, but it’s likely those students weren’t cognitively equipped to do the writing tasks they were asked to perform.
To unlock the potential of writing to boost learning, we need to do at least three things. First, we need to modulate the heavy cognitive load writing imposes so that students have the capacity to retain and comprehend the content they’re writing about. We can do that by starting explicit instruction at the sentence level, if that’s what students need; teaching students how to create clear, linear outlines for paragraphs and essays; and ensuring they’re writing about topics they’ve already learned something about.
Second, we need to teach grammar and syntax through students’ own writing—and for that, it’s crucial to begin at the sentence level. Third, we need to embed writing instruction in the content of the curriculum as much as possible, so that we’re using it to reinforce and deepen the knowledge we want students to retain.
I’ve seen that when schools undertake a collective effort to teach writing in this way, they see improvements not only in students’ writing skills, but also in their learning and thinking—and, more generally, in their confidence. If we make writing less overwhelmingly difficult for students—and inform them of the learning benefits it can bring—they may be less tempted to offload this demanding but vital task onto ChatGPT.
