

I can confirm that a lot of student’s writing have become “averaged” and it seems to have gotten worse this semester. I am not talking about students who clearly used an AI tool, but just by proximity or osmosis writing feels “cardboardy”. Devoid of passions or human mistakes.
That isn’t what I mean by cardboard. Persuasive, research, argumentative essays have been taught to be written the way tou described. They are meant to be that way. But even then, the essays I have read and graded still have this cardboard feel. I have read plenty of research essays where you can feel the emotion, you can surmise the position and most of all passion of the author. This passion and the delicate picking of words and phrases are not there. It is “averaged”.