Business · The Guardian Technology
Answer in a signed letter to the author, attached to their story
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Remember that an effective peer review demands close reading of the text accompanied by a boldness of spirit.
Key facts
- In George Orwell’s 1946 essay Confessions of a Book Reviewer, Orwell describes himself surrounded by unread books, “constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous
- The reporter has been teaching fiction writing at MIT since 2017
- Other studies warn of similar dangers, from not-yet-peer-reviewed reports with self-explanatory titles such as “ AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance ” and “ Generative
- Micah Nathan is a novelist, essayist and MIT lecturer in fiction and nonfiction writing whose books include Gods of Aberdeen and Losing Graceland
Summary
Read the story at least twice. Mark what works and what doesn’t, underline great sentences, flag clunky syntax, gaps in logic and unrealistic dialogue. As the directions foreshadow, most of the time they're discussing why they didn’t like the story being workshopped, because writing a good story is immensely difficult even under the best conditions, especially for Stem-centric undergrads who thrive within a structure of quantitative problems and solutions, systems where there’s a right answer and a clean method for arriving at it. Fiction writing isn’t quantitative. An effective workshop is a paradox: students must provide textual evidence to support the qualitative as if it were the quantitative. It’s a lot for the ego to absorb. AI’s prose is perfectly mediocre, producing the sort of inert gloss that reads like a Frankensteinian amalgam of MFA-workshopped writing, an unintentional parody of the style it mimics.