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Writing is among the finest and most enigmatic forms of human creativity. There is undeniable charm and power in transforming the imagined word into expressions that can be read, heard, spoken, or understood. In essence, writing can move as much as it can stop people.

While writing has different functions, it serves a prime purpose to communicate ideas that transcend time and boundaries. With the tools that emerge with today’s technology, the craft of writing has become more delicate than ever. For students who are pressed with tasks such as essays or theses, there is the temptation to use generative technologies that do more stifling than enabling.

In mid-November 2024, Keystone Academy launched Keystone Thought Lab, its newest multidisciplinary intellectual series that invites experts and educators from various fields to engage with the community through thought-provoking lectures, workshops, and more. Its inaugural speaker, award-winning journalist and professor Leonard Cassuto, shared ideas from his book, Academic Writing as if Readers Matter, which sparked the bright minds in the Keystone Secondary School.

Following a short keynote speech about his book, Professor Cassuto, who teaches at Fordham University, shared his teaching and research experience during a question-and-answer session, offering some anecdotes and takes about the issues that beleaguer writers of different ages and expertise. As words count a lot, how can writers make every expression matter, especially for readers? Professor Cassuto offers insights in the following dialogue.

This dialogue has been edited for brevity.

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About the Keystone Thought Lab speaker

Leonard Cassuto is currently a Professor of English at Fordham University. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University, with research interests in American literature and the U.S. higher education system. In addition to his academic research, Professor Cassuto has long been dedicated to graduate career development. He has closely collaborated with Princeton University’s GradFUTURES to establish the first interdisciplinary, cross-student-and-faculty “Career Development Workshop”. In 2023, he received Princeton University’s GRADitude Award for Advancing Graduate Professional Development.

Professor Cassuto also has extensive experience in academic writing and publishing, having authored ten books in collaboration with leading academic publishers.

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Keystone student: How often should we ask students to think about the readers?

Prof. Cassuto: I’ve been writing for publication for a little longer than 35 years. I’ve made many mistakes, as I describe in the book. If you live long enough and you write long enough, you’re going to make a lot of errors. And that’s fine as long as you learn from them. In fact, there are a couple of points where I use my own published writing as an example of what not to do.

As I’ve suggested, it is simpler to say than it is to do, particularly since academic writing is a culture that encourages showing off. Sometimes, it’s difficult to avoid that temptation. Sometimes, you don’t even know that you’re slipping into it. So, like all good writers, I rewrite a lot. I show my writing to people and listen to their feedback. Quite often, especially if they’re trusted readers, I’m going to revise based on that feedback because not only is academia a community, but writing is collaborative.

Keystone student: Why has academic writing become a culture of ostentatious displays of intelligence rather than community building?

Prof. Cassuto: I think there are quite a number of possible reasons, but I think one of the most pressing is the competition. Academics are professionals who live in a competitive culture. Graduate students who want to be academics compete to get into that competitive culture. There’s a need to distinguish yourself in an individualistic model of distinction.

As I said, it’s possible to do this without showing off. But the temptation to show off is very great because the writer imagines—partly because the writer looks at the models around them and says, “Look at all these other writers showing off. I must have to do that myself.” So, the culture perpetuates itself in this way and plays into the highly competitive nature of academic culture around the world.

We can’t change the fact that academia is competitive. I can’t think of how we will change that soon, but we can change the culture of performance within it—that if we perform in a way designed to build communities of knowledge rather than distinction, it is still possible. If we reward writing that communicates rather than writing that is an illusion of communication, we will all be better off.

Keystone student: As a student writing for a specific audience such as teachers, what can we change or improve to make our writing better and, perhaps, more understandable for our teachers?

Prof. Cassuto: One option is to find out what your teacher wants from you. The best way to be friendly to a reader is to meet the reader’s needs. Now, some teachers will tell you exactly what their needs are. That’s a useful move when it happens. But if it doesn’t happen, you can ask, “What do you need as a reader?” You may think you can’t possibly ask a teacher a question, but you can ask them a question like that. Teachers want you to ask questions because that’s how learning happens. Learning is an exchange—it has to be an exchange. It can’t go just one way.

Let me tell you something else, and this is the advice from my four decades in the classroom: Teachers have a lot more fun when they’re learning something. If I’m in a classroom or a seminar, I expect a conversation. I want my students to get into a conversation with me and with each other.

The reason that I love my job is because I want to stay in school for my whole life. So far, that’s been successful. I’ve always liked school, and so it turned out to be an excellent career choice. Your teachers are in the classroom because they like being there. You might want to think this is in some ways to answer your question: “What do they like about being there?” “How can you meet their needs and also your own?” So, this is part of what it means to be in a community: It is to get a sense of the needs of the community members. Writing is part of that. It’s obviously the subject of my book, but learning communities are not just built around writing. This is teaching. And I made a point in the book that writing is teaching. When you are a writer, you’re teaching somebody something. Teachers don’t necessarily have to write in order to teach.

Keystone teacher: We are teaching students the kinds of writing models. I always consider these to influence the creativity and the performance of students. For example, I read a student paper, which will probably get a grade of 7 or 8. It has full details and covers criteria. Yet, at the same time, I found it redundant and a bit boring. So, what is the best way to teach writing to students?

Prof. Cassuto: I want to focus on an important tension you raised because a lot of learning occurs at these points. The tension you said that when you read writing, you feel that you are reading a student’s mind. That’s true because writing is a personal act. This is what I think makes writing so enjoyable. You’re putting yourself out there for people. See that the tension between the personal aspect of writing and the restrictive models you describe can be quite confining: You must write the essay and the first paragraph must contain this, and so on. When you teach such models, writing becomes less personal; instead, it becomes mechanical in such a way that you have to fulfill the requirements of the format.

So, how can we reconcile this? Personally, I’m not fond of those models because I think they create more problems than they solve. They do solve some issues. They can be like training wheels on a bicycle. Most of us learn to ride a bicycle with training wheels. You learn how the bicycle moves but not fall because the training wheels catch you. Eventually, you take off the training wheels and learn to ride the bicycle properly. If we think about these models as an example of that, it’s something that you learn in order to unlearn later. Perhaps, we can get more usefulness out of those models.

I will go so far as to say that it is part of the teachers’ responsibility while teaching the models to assure the students that this is not the way you need to write forever and that this isn’t some kind of model of ideal correctness. It is like training wheels; as a writer, you have a responsibility to take them off later on. But if the teacher tells the writer at the beginning of this and repeats it often enough, then the writer will have the confidence to strip off those wheels when the occasion allows.

Keystone student: How can writers maintain a unique voice and style while adhering to academic conventions?

Prof. Cassuto: This is absolutely a test for all writers who are starting out. There is no one answer to this except this: Always remember the importance of keeping your voice—there will be times when you need to adjust your voice. You don’t expect your writing to sound the same when you’re writing a lab report compared to the writing that you do when, for example, interpreting current events. It shouldn’t be because the demands of the task are different.

Similarly, if you’re writing for a teacher who encourages you to develop your voice, you might sound different. If you’re fulfilling a task for a teacher who is unusually demanding and maybe just doesn’t want you to do anything you consider creative, that teacher is still your reader, at least for a few months. But don’t assume that a reader who you have for a few months has to change your style forever.

You live with your voice. You live with your teacher for a few months. You have to try to hang on through your own life’s journey. Everyone’s life journey as a writer is going to be different. Keep the value of your voice; you’ve got the most important thing going through already.

Keystone student: Since Grade 10, I’ve noticed that we’ve been affected by time crunch because most of it includes academic writing, such as in our World Civilization or Science classes. Do you think time constraints help us improve the quality of our writing, especially when considering the reader? Or is it not? 

Prof. Cassuto: Time limits are a two-edged sword. On the one hand, they keep you from getting too hung up or wound up. And you’re just forgetting that the object of fulfilling a writing task is writing something, and that not everything has to be perfect. Almost no article starts out perfectly. So, writing under a time limit, which some professional writers such as journalists do every day, is not necessarily bad. That way, it can keep you from getting stocked up. 

On the other hand, writing everything under a time limit discourages a lot of the craft of revision, unless revision is built into the task. Maybe you do the first draft with limited time, but maybe your teacher allows you to return to what you did and make it the basis of something longer, more elaborate, and more thoughtfully detailed. But I think that’s a conversation that you can have as students with your teacher. If you want to become a better writer, telling your teachers what you think might help you do that is useful.  

Keystone teacher: The last few pages of your book touch upon the influence of artificial intelligence on writing. I wonder whether you have some advice for teachers and students about this situation.  

Prof. Cassuto: When I finished this book, AI was new on the scene. I will say it’s still new on the scene [even though] this has been here for a while.  

My advice for students is simple, and it is at the end of the book: Let it help you, but don’t let it be you. If you let it be, you will deprive yourself of your sensibility. Your sensibility is what makes your writing you. Going back to the question asked earlier, if you let AI substitute for your writing, it will take your voice. And if that happens, it takes everything that’s distinctive away from you. And your writing won’t be able to clasp a hand because it won’t be human. Now, if your goal is to write manuals, for instance, for how to build a bookshelf, AI can probably be helpful there. But even then, it needs a human to supervise it.  

But my advice to teachers is slightly more complicated: We need to remember that AI is a tool. First of all, it’s a new and very powerful tool that can cause a lot of anxiety. We’ve been dealing with new tools for a long time. Word processors were new tools, as were typewriters before. A movable type of printing technology was a new tool before that. In other words, human beings have been incorporating tools of increasing complexity into our writing process since long before recorded history.  

The first writings were transcriptions of oral performances passed down through the generations. Think about epic poems like Gilgamesh, the Iliad, or the Odyssey. These all started as part of oral culture. You can see that when they were first written down, they had hallmarks of being told and retold: certain kinds of repetitions were a kind of oral technology that helped tellers and retailers keep the story going. In the early days of books, you had to have a scribe copy it down on an envelopment. In the early days of movable type, books were enormously expensive; only the rich and, in some cases, only churches could afford them. In those days, the definition of intelligence was centered on remembering things, which made a lot of sense when you thought about it. If books are expensive and nobody can afford them, then you pass information from place to place through people who have superb memories. Memory became a compelling attribute and synonymous with genius. If you compare that to today, everybody has a perfect memory. Memory has become more of a party trick. 

Now, we think about intelligence in different ways. We respect people with good memories. We don’t think somebody is a genius just because they have an excellent memory. It’s an example of how tool use has affected the way that we go about our jobs, such as thinking and writing, as human beings. So, AI is a tool that will make a difference, and we need to learn how to use that tool thoughtfully. It may affect how we think about what we do in some important ways. It won’t take away our humanity because a writer writes for other human beings. AI cannot substitute for that. If you think it can, then you will become a worse writer because of it. 

Keystone student: In what ways can you use AI for writing? 

Prof. Cassuto: One of the ways is to give you feedback on some of what you’ve written. I want you to remember that despite the term “intelligence”, AI is very limited in its intelligence, particularly in terms of content. Most of the large language models don’t give you sources.  

We could say it’s just a matter of time before the large language models get access to the databases that contain the specialized resource research that professional academics use all the time. But right now, it is not, because those who run those specialized databases don’t share a financial interest with those who run large language models. In fact, their interests are opposed. So, don’t expect large language models to gain access to specialized research anytime soon. So, if you are wondering how you can use AI to get feedback on what you’re doing, don’t expect it to be a genius on a specialized subject. It won’t be. And the more familiar a subject is, the more AI will know from Internet scraping. The more specialized the subject, the less it will know when you get to the bottom. When you get into some of the really fundamental, specialized research, large language models will not have access to that for the foreseeable future or maybe forever. There are limits to the kind of feedback that AI can give you. 

Keystone student: When we write about ourselves, readers may be put off because it’s not something they’d want to read. But on the other side, what should we write about the rest of the others? Because you say something about showing off. How can we reconcile this? How do we build this work together?  

Prof. Cassuto: We’re in this boat together. How do we balance the different needs of some people in the boat? Or perhaps, how do we deal with competing demands on us? I was thinking because every time I can do the research for each audience, I’m like, “I don’t have the time. I don’t know their life.” So, that’s a skill I need to develop. 

So, how can you know the needs of your audience if you don’t have access to them? Let’s flash forward to some years into the future: You want to write an article for a magazine with a wide circulation. You have to please the editor, who is your first audience in this imaginary example, which is not imaginary at all because it’ll happen to some people. How do you satisfy the needs of the editor when you’re never going to talk to the editor before you submit? Here’s one way to think about this. You want to write for this magazine. What if you look at its last 12 issues? You read the first two pages of each article in those 12 issues. That’s a task, but it’s not an enormous task. Think about what happens when you’re finished with this task. 

Now, you will see much more about the kind of writing the editor wants to publish than you did before. You can now make some safe assumptions about what that editor is like as a reader. You can make some decisions as a writer. In other words, not all readers are as mysterious and inscrutable. 

As you may think, there are clues to what readers want all over the place. Usually, by looking at their actions and choices you can learn much about what somebody wants as a reader. If they’re an editor, you think about what kind of writing they accept. 

But finally, and I think this is one of the reasons your question is so good: You’re pointing to the need to make judgment calls as a writer. You have to make judgments. “How am I going to do this?” I have choices about how I’m going to approach my task. “How do I make these judgments? On what basis? What kinds of factors are going to enter into these choices?” The writing is filled with judgment calls. “Do I want to conclude by looking forward or looking backward?” It depends on what I did to get here. If I need to summarize a complicated argument that I just made, maybe looking backward is a good idea. If I’ve been working with a topic that really has a vast horizon in front of me, maybe I want to conclude by looking forward. As a writer, that’s a judgment call; you want to develop your judgment. You develop it by making mistakes. 

In other words, by getting experience, you make judgments. You learn as much as you can before you make them, but don’t be shy about making them. That’s part of having a voice: believing in yourself and what you have to say. And part of being a writer is not being right all the time. Something I tell writers already in the publication game is, “If you’re not getting rejected, you’re not doing it.” Because if you’re not being rejected, you’re not taking your writing out to the edge and trying to expand what you can do. 

All writing is about rejection. In some ways, I hope it’s also about acceptance and learning about who you are as a writer and thinker. And that means you have to test your and your audience’s limits. Test to see what they can do, what you can do. That’s how you develop the experience that will make your judgment strong. So, don’t be afraid of rejection. If you want to write, you do it for wider audiences. Understand that getting rejected is part of how you learn. 

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Writing is as much an exploration of oneself as it is an act of connecting with others. The craft demands courage, humility, and a relentless commitment to clarity—not as mere standards of excellence but as tools for building genuine, impactful communication. After all, writing is not just a personal endeavor; it is a gift shared with readers, inviting them to join in a conversation that transcends the page and resonates through time.

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About the Keystone Thought Lab

The Keystone Thought Lab is a series of intellectual sharing sessions on various disciplines. Initiated by the Keystone Office of Marketing and Communications, Keystone Thought Lab features experts and educators from different professional and academic fields who engage in lectures, discussions, workshops, and other activities centered around diverse themes. This initiative aims to express the beauty of academia and bring the entrepreneurial spirit to the Keystone campus, guiding students to explore the depth and possibilities of knowledge.