12 You Matter (in writing)

You’re you.

OK. I know that seems sort of… well… duh. Of course you’re you, who else would you be? But, if you are anything like me and your educational experience so far has been anything like mine was, you’ve probably been told that you shouldn’t be you, at least not in your writing.

Let me explain.

Most of you have been writing academic essays for years. Research-based papers and literature analysis papers and argumentative essays on controversial topics. And, most likely, at some point along the way, you had a teacher say one (or all) of these things:

Three rules of writing: no “I”, no “opinion”, and be “proper.”

Let’s go ahead and throw those three rules right out the window, OK? Those are the kinds of rules that make it possible – even easy – for students to turn to ChatGPT to write their essays. They’re the kinds of rules that take the personality, soul, and meaning out of anything you write and turn it into something that anyone, including the latest version of a chatbot, could have written.

Let’s be honest for just a moment: there are things you aren’t qualified to write about. Most of you are not experts in nuclear energy or naval warfare strategies. You’re not experts on the three laws of thermodynamics (you probably didn’t even know there were three laws; I didn’t either) or the geopolitics of the Middle East, and you probably haven’t spent years studying the impacts of SSRIs on human brain chemistry. So, if you wrote about any of those things, your opinions might not be taken all that seriously and you’d definitely need to do some research.

But there are things you are eminently qualified to write about. Things you know about, things you have significant experience with, things you might even be considered an expert in. And to write about many of those things, you’d need to use “I” and you’d have to have an opinion, and yes, you might want to sound good, but that doesn’t always equal out to proper or formal, especially not when adding in all that proper and formal means subtracting out all the you.

We live in an age where I can ask a GenAI chatbot to write me a 500 word essay on whatever topic I want and it will spit something out in less than a minute. That something might even be ‘decent’ or maybe even ‘good’. But it won’t be real and it won’t be human – even if the chatbot tries – and, most of all, it won’t be you. And you have things to say.

Even if you don’t know it yet. Or even if you’ve never been given the chance until now.