I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.

I got an A on that paper.

Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.

This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.

You will never learn to bullshit.

And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.

For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.

I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.

Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.

I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.

Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.

For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.

Unfortunately, what I heard was "read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea."

Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn't multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.

And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.

I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.

I bullshitted my way to a B+ on it.

On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.

It's been 16 years since I took that test.

I couldn't tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.

But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.

The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.

Taking this and building on it, I have a Bachelor's Degree in English, which I sometimes say means that I have a BA in BS.

Because it's true.

Even at a university level.

By the time I graduated, I'd learned, from necessity, that I could actually get by in my classes - my university senior level English classes - by reading about half of them and just paying really good attention in class for the rest. Because I literally just didn't have the time and energy to do all the readings and work from my combined course load. I think maybe one teacher caught on to what I was doing, because I would be more involved in class discussions when I'd read the piece for the day than when I hadn't, but she couldn't prove a damned thing, because I was still interacting, showing up for class, taking vigorous notes, and passing.

Off the top of my head, I did not read Robinson Crusoe, Beloved, or The Handmaid's Tale, amongst many others, though I did lead a class discussion for a bit on The Handmaid's Tale when we got to the chapter about the Wife cutting off wilting flower blossoms in her garden. Not because I'd read the spark notes or knew anything about what was going on in the story, but because, the previous summer, I'd been helping my mom garden, including preforming the exact same task the Wife was doing. Which meant that I - alone in the entire class, including my professor - knew that it's a process called 'dead-heading,' and it's meant to keep the plant producing flowers for longer by not letting its blooms to get to the point of forming seedpods, tricking it into thinking it still needs to reproduce. Fantastic discussion, based on context and botany rather than the book. So I looked good, got the important themes and messages of the book, and saved time to do other readings I actually felt comfortable putting in my head.

My final report card in my academic career was straight A's, the first such I'd ever gotten in my life, and I still haven't read Jane Eyre, in spite of having been assigned it for two different classes. And I've never made a dime off of that knowledge directly, but b'golly if knowing how to gather information from context and paying attention, being able to read critically in this age of misinformation, and being able to tell people what they want to hear while I do what's best for me hasn't served me well every single day of my life since I graduated.