This is a project that was way in over its head. An academic book?? That’s insane. Like the hardest thing ever (and the most boring). But I took it on, mainly to end the boredom. Academic writing books have generally been very good at turning “regular folk” (non-“writers”) away from writing. I don’t blame them. Writing, traditionally, has been an endless scroll of ego and exclusion. I relate to them. Even as a writer, I find academic books on writing inaccessible and rigid.

“Textbook Tetris,” as one of my students called traditional textbook design, drove me nuts too. All those black and white paragraphs in gray boxes, perfect little rectangles with pink and yellow squares all around, containing more impenetrable text. There’s no end in sight, just more of this exclusive language. I felt an aversion to this long before the interruptions and stimulus of social media (I started my Instagram account in like 2008 or something). Visually, these books make me nauseous and nervous.

Observing my students’ needs today, I knew I needed to rescue us from this overbearing game of Textbook Tetris.

So, I took it upon myself to create something that I, Prof. HM, could bear. I like a textbook because I like the structure and foresight it offers the students off the bat, but these books were also always a disappointment: dry, disengaged, dense. My goal here was to write about writing in way that engages the audience and reflects our contemporary, exciting ways of retaining information.

Writing is no longer just alphabetical text; it’s image, design, style, symbol, sound, surprise. To put it simply, it’s multimodal. With AI, multimodality will skyrocket. In class, it’s not enough for my students to “find an image that reflects the tone of the introduction,” anymore; now, it must be, “design a photo with AI that reflects the tone of the introduction.” So, it’s no longer a mix and match, it’s a design and craft. As much as academics want to accuse AI of simplifying too much, is there perhaps a case that it could add complexity to our voices and processes?

This is to be determined. I do believe as long as writers stay true to themselves, their values, their goals, the authentic writer’s voice still has a chance.