Why We Must Fight the Demise of the Essay

In January of 2021, it was announced that the SAT would permanently shed its essay section. Of course, it had been optional since 2016, and so perhaps that final nail in the coffin was superfluous. But this move did not occur in a vacuum. The essay has been under attack at all educational levels and especially since the advent of ChatGPT. “The College Essay Is Dead,” argued Stephen Marche in The Atlantic in December 2022, blaming AI for the murder in question. Then this summer, Hua Hsu, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and professor of English followed up on Marche’s thoughts in the New Yorker, asking “What Happens After AI Destroys College Writing?”