We live in a world where identity is not inherently valued. Because of our capitalistic society only caring about meeting deadlines and cutting corners, individual identity is minimized for the sake of efficiency. A majority of college classes get students ready to one day work in an office, a place where your own identity is not allowed beyond a novelty mug on your desk.
In my own college experience up to this point, the only writing class I have completed is College Composition (those pesky gen eds got in the way). There were many times where I felt that the point of the class was not to teach the students to write well, but to instead teach the students how to all write exactly the same. I myself found that much of my feathery word choice was crossed out with blue pen on the teacher’s printed out copy. As for my peers, I saw hundreds of blue scribbles across their papers with numerous suggestions that all mostly surmounted to one final concept. This concept was purging identity and character from the writing of the students and turning them all into information regurgitating machines. This made the class’ full ban of ChatGPT funny to me, as it seemed as though the teacher’s intention was to turn as all into miniature versions of that system.
Identity ought to be encouraged in all forms of writing. This includes communicative, creative, and academic settings. We are nothing without our identity. Similarly, writing is not worthwhile if it does not include the identity of the writer themselves. In fact, the most worthwhile writing is often bleeding from its eyes with the writer’s identity.
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