Wordsmithing: Writing is Good for You!
One of the saddest things about rising AI use for writing is that people miss the opportunity to exercise their brains and express themselves. Just look at the outrage over Google's recent Gemini commercial that recommends having children use AI to write fan letters to their favorite Olympic athletes. What athlete wants to receive fan mail written by AI? The mistakes and unique wording that a child uses make the written word authentic. In the same way, the unique, imperfect writing of college students should be valued as part of the expressive and developmental process.
When you are struggling to put words together on a 
page, this process is known as wordsmithing. Like a blacksmith, who works with metal, a wordsmith works with words to make sentences sharper and clearer. Wordsmithing means selecting and rearranging words to express the ideas you are creating. It is a skill you can only learn by doing it. The computer can’t do it for you. If you are an athlete trying to gain muscle, you can’t get a robot to lift weights for you!
This is why your instructors want you to go through the struggle of learning to write and think for yourself: no pain, no gain. It pushes your brain to its limits when you are writing and rewriting and reshaping exactly what you are trying to say--and it results in massive "brain muscle" gains!
Here are the areas of knowledge that are exercised when you do your own writing:
By pushing yourself to a higher level, you’ll gain a sense of satisfaction that only comes from doing your own good old-fashioned hard work.
Areas of Knowledge Exercised by Writing:
