Reclaiming the Essay in the Age of AI: Teaching Writing as Thinking in the English Classroom

What does the essay accomplish in a GenAI-saturated world? We consider this problem through our experience of teaching college students as instructors of English literature. Rather than abandoning the form or defending it on nostalgic grounds, this article argues against the “death of the essay,” contending that the emergence of GenAI clarifies what is distinctive about human writing: a process by which a writer discovers and experiments with one’s thinking, and through which one is transformed. While LLMs can produce syntactically smooth prose and simulated coherence, these linguistic outcomes do not ensure the formation of a writerly subject. Recalling Donald Murray’s account of composition as process and David Russell’s critique of writing’s reduction to transferable skill, we turn to Theodor W. Adorno’s “The Essay as Form,” which defines essayistic writing as “writing while experimenting” and reframes essay writing as a reflective, relational epistemology. On these grounds, we propose a writing pedagogy that treats the essay as an experimental site of inquiry, not a polished end product. We illustrate this goal through two classroom activities: first, we discuss the “Writing as Discovery: Problem-Question-Motive” method that invokes students’ curiosity and converts interpretive puzzles into clear stakes and motives. We then discuss “Writing as Experiment: Situated Reading Journal,” which uses low-stakes first-person entries to register the importance of affect, exchange, and revision in critical writing. These models recast essay instruction as cultivating students’ capacity to visibly trace, revise, and own the movement of their thinking against the tide of machine-generated text.