Is the End of Reading Here? GenAI and the Reading Writing Classroom

“The End of Reading is Here” from The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch

• Click here to link to the article in The Atlantic.
• For Rose Horowitch’s profile page on X, click here.

Quotes from the article for discussion are bolded below and in quotes.

“…fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022.”

This week my friend Dave Witzig texting me to ask what I’ve been reading…

Going to Huzzah Books in Boone to hear Zachary Vernon read from his book Eating on a Mountain at the End of the World

My wife and I are daily readers.

The resurgence of daughters, ages 18 and 20, reading.

I remember a faculty meeting around the year 2015 at St. John’s in Queens when I wondered aloud to my colleagues if reading was going to continue to be a primary way that people in their teens and 20’s learned. A few people thought it was a pretty funny joke. I wasn’t kidding.

“Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and 40 percent say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it.”

Where do my kids get their news? I think exclusively from TikTok and Instagram.

The news sites I check out regularly…

• ESPN, The New York Times, Fox News, The Atlantic
• The challenge of figuring out news about the diarrhea lettuce.

“And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information.”

What counts as reading? Does an audiobook count?

What counts as writing? The concepts we work with in composition applied to social media including YouTube.

Is counting overrated?

The stamina of attention span.

I use GenAI platforms. If you use them for everything, what might you miss?

• Writing as a tool for knowing.
• You still have to “know stuff” to use GenAI the same way you have to “know stuff” to use a Google or Library Database Search. For example, you might have to have read to know who Dean Oliver is as you pursue an effective way to use basketball analytics as a coach. Students might throw around the word “pedagogy” in a reflection because GenAI produced it for them. Students who copy and paste from GenAI don’t always see how their texts stand out in a negative way among all the other texts that students turn in.

“And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether. Readers can return to a text and plumb it for new meaning and understanding. Because writing endures, individuals can temporarily forget what they’ve written but trust that it won’t be lost forever.”

One of the things I like about books: a person has taken the time to pull the text together. For me, a book doesn’t diappear into the ether the way an article is more likely to. Of course, there are exceptions!

“Faced with shrinking attention spans and declining comprehension, schools might have been expected to resist the impulse toward shorter passages and shallower reading. Instead, they spurred it on. A 2025 survey found that most middle- and high-school English teachers assigned zero to four books a year.”

• I am least partially guilty while at the same time trying to draw the students I work with into reading.
• Getting assigned 5 books in a week in graduate school (didn’t read it all) while at the same time showing up to a first class having read the whole text already.
• Reading workshops. I’m doing my favorite thing right now except for that I’m doing it on my own.

The Last 5 Books I Read and Enjoyed:

1. The Contemporary American Essay edited by Phillip Lopate
2. Rapture by Nick Nurse with Michael Sokolove
3. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (about David Foster Wallace) by D.T. Max
4. Heartland (about Larry Bird at Indiana State) by Keith O’Brien
5. True and False Magic by Phil Stutz. (Three constants: Pain, Uncertainty, and The Need for Constant Work)

Did I read or watch any other stories this week?

1. The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. She acts like a patient for med students.
2. Domestic Gulags by Laura Kipnis. A huge list of stuff like this: You can’t be a slob. You can’t do less than 50 percent around the house, even if the other person wants to do 100 to 200 percent more housecleaning than you find necessary or even reasonable.
3. Ann; Death and The Maiden by David Lazar. About an old relationship in which the former partner takes their life.
4. The Hawk tv series on Netflix starring Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, and Luke Wilson. Crass and explicit. At times laugh out loud funny. Introduced me to Fortune Feimster who both of my kids new from social media.

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