RIP Research Paper

Dr. Randy Laist

Since time out of mind in the history of college classes, the research paper had been the pedagogical climax of the learning experience, the assignment that the whole class leads up to and away from, the intellectual coup de grace intended to affirm the student’s expertise.

The format and features of these research papers varied according to academic level and discipline, but they tended to share a certain aesthetic of impersonal anonymity.  Sometimes first-person pronouns were even explicitly prohibited. 

They foregrounded summaries of research that had been done previously on the writer’s topic, and the presence of too much original content in the absence of a sufficient ratio of recycled content was considered a mark of failure.  The arguments of these papers tended to be more about the writing of previous commentators than about the topic that the commentators commentated about.

For many instructors, the most important aspect of such research papers was the question of whether the papers’ citations were punctuated according to the specifications of the relevant edition of the relevant professional style guide.

Successful student research papers were those that looked and sounded like convincing approximations of the kinds of research papers published in professional journals.  Research papers failed according to the extent that they were quirky, digressive, ungeneralizable, vernacular, or even (god forbid) inaccurately cited.

In the age of AI, it is easy to look back and discern that the same inchoate yearnings that caused human beings to invent chatbots are the same ones that inspired the dream of the classical academic research paper.  The dream is that knowledge could exist in a purely disembodied space of pure objectivity, that human consciousness could remake itself in the guise of the Heideggerian “They,” the “they” of “They say it’s going to rain,” the nobodiness of pure knowing.

Before the chatbots existed, that is, we had to train our young people to become chatbots.  But now, curiously, miraculously, the invention of the chatbots has freed us from having to be them.  Human beings will always have a use for a nice clear description of how cells divide, and it’s necessary that such prose be generated somehow.  In the old days, it may have seemed necessary to train young people to do this important work, even at the risk of slightly disfiguring their souls.  But not anymore.

Now that the chatbots are writing our research papers for us, think of all the fun we can have with the written word!  It turns out that writing is one of the best techniques human beings have for thinking into difficult problems, for excavating half-formed thoughts from subconsciousness, for formulating new ideas and new solutions, for incorporating new knowledge into existing cognitive architectures, and even for redrawing such cognitive architectures into new shapes and opening them out into new dimensions. 

Writing about something requires a degree of focus and precision that other means of communication only approximate.  The intellectual work of translating vaguely perceived intuitions into specific words and sentences activates the brain at every level, from the executive function of the neocortex to the primordial centers of emotion and motivation.  Since language is distributed throughout the brain as densely connected networks of association, bringing one word into the light of consciousness tends to drag up other words, other ideas, other connections.  The result is that a writer doesn’t simply express what they know, they discover meaning and invent it out of their own background, their memories, their dreams – in short, out of themselves.   

Maybe this idea-making quality of language is one of the reasons why cultural progress became turbo-charged around six thousand years ago when writing systems first emerged, why expertise has historically been associated with authorship, and even why the research paper came to be canonized as the summum bonum of academic performance. 

But the chatbots have also taught us how mechanical and perfunctory the fossilized genre of the research paper had become.  Rather than unlocking the power of writing, the research paper seemed too often to constrain writing into predetermined paths.  These days, any teacher who reads a student’s research paper has to determine whether it is written by the student or by the chatbot.  If the paper sounds like it was written by a chatbot but is actually the student’s own writing, that’s good, but if the same paper was actually written by a chatbot, that’s bad.  It is easy to sympathize with students (and teachers) who conclude that there’s no point in doing the hard work of writing for the purpose of emulating a machine that can do the same thing a lot better and a lot faster.  It would be like trying to start a fire with two sticks when there is a perfectly good lighter ready to hand.

But as effectively as the chatbots might write for us, no matter how advanced they become, they will never be able to do our thinking for us, not the kind of personal thinking that takes place when a human being uses writing to explore what they know, what they wonder about, and why it matters to them.  This is why, although the research paper might be going extinct, out of its corpse bloom a million different ways of using the power of writing as a teaching tool across the curriculum, as a means of recruiting students into the active construction of knowledge, as a means of encouraging them to weave new information into the texture of their memories, their ways of being in the world, and their styles of self-expression, and, most importantly, as a means of vindicating the importance of their ideas, their consciousness, their words. 

Young people need to know that their voices matter.  Every student is a unique miracle of the cosmos, bearing a distinctive neuroarchitecture that is unprecedented in the history of the universe.  If the research paper can be criticized for prioritizing standardized forms of expression over students’ authentic questions and perspectives, abandoning writing altogether as a pedagogical tool threatens even more tragically to communicate the message to students that they are passive recipients of established truths.  When we ask students to write about what they think, what they hope, what they fear, what they imagine, we not only equip them with a cognitive tool for thinking and learning, but we also reaffirm their value as human beings. 

There is certainly something about writing that is uniquely human – it may turn out to be the only human behavior that is definitively unparalleled in the animal world.  The death of the research paper is a golden opportunity for breathing new life into the way we think about the role of writing in teaching and learning, as well as in being, becoming, and remaining human.