On October 2nd 2026 I was invited to give a talk for TEDx Aston University. It was fantastic to be asked and just the right amount of terrifying. Even as someone who is fairly used to public speaking, I got a little freaked. The TED format is quite unusual as both a genre and in its length, and I elected to speak without notes or slides, which is typical but not absolutely necessary for a TED talk. I was supported in the talk by Elinor Vettriano who provided speaker coaching for the event and I spoke alongside Helen Higson, Dileep Marway, Avni Ahuja, Kamese Davis and Sharon Thompson all of whom gave well-delivered, interesting and sometimes personal talks – check their talks out when they appear up on the TED website.
I think when I was invited the organisers may have wanted me to deliver a talk on forensic linguistic casework, but I find this content difficult and often depressing, and it seemed a poor fit for an upbeat TED event. It is also well covered in the Writing Wrongs podcast I co-host with Nicci Macleod. Go there if you want that. Instead, I chose to spoke about the development of the essay as an attempt to improve and clarifying thinking, and how this contrasts with current University use of the essay as an assessment, and I also wanted to discuss the contemporary crisis for written assessments in the age of AI.
One aspect of my talk focused on the etymology of the word ‘essay’ from the French ‘essayer’, a try, or an attempt. In preparing my talk I didn’t write it out and memorise the text. I wrote and re-wrote my talk as a series of bullet points that I wanted to talk around. I was happy with my attempt on the night. Naturally I missed some of the points I meant to cover, and I didn’t land all of my lines, but overall the talk went well. I am pleased with the outcome and very pleased to have been asked to do it.
The spirit of my talk though was that the thinking should never stop and – so I came home and decided to have another go. This time, obviously 🤷♂️, I wrote my talk as an essay. As you will read below, it’s not a very academic essay. I’ve not researched the facts in the way I would if writing an academic paper – for my original talk I looked up some dates etc. but I’ve not thoroughly re-read Montaigne or Locke – so experts in those writers may have to give me some slack. I hope I’ve not misrepresented their thinking, but I’m aware I’m being broad brush and using them for rhetorical effect. I’ve not formally referenced my essay either, but I hope there’s enough information within what I’ve written for an interested reader to find the people and texts I mention.
So, this attempt at the The Life and Death of the Essay is what it is – another attempt. It may not be the final attempt. It is longer and some of the arguments are filled out, and hopefully I’ve landed more rhetorical lines than in the TEDx version. I’ve still written it as if for a talk – it’s come out in a kind of hybrid register between a speech and a written essay. I guess it’s a bit more formal than theTEDx version, like a written speech.
You’ll find a bit more here than in the live event or when my talk appears on YouTube.
If this is too long for you – these days it would count as ‘a long read’ — then the TEDx talk is a shorter attempt of what I’ve been thinking about.
Do leave comments and criticism – you’ve missed the opportunity to throw fruit at me this year, but if that’s what you’d like to do, perhaps TEDx will invite me back for another talk another time.
The Life and Death of the Essay
- How good are you at thinking?
- How do you know how good you are at thinking?
- How would you improve your ability to think?
These were questions that were troubling Michel de Montaigne in 1570.
To answer these questions Montaigne invented a new modern technology for improving thinking – he invented ‘the essay’.
In the ten years after 1570, Montaigne shut himself away in a tower, in his chateau, in the Dordogne, in rural France, and wrote more than 100 essays.
He wrote on a world of topics. He wrote and rewrote about religion and the beginnings of science, he wrote and rewrote about ethics and politics, he wrote and rewrote about education. Montaigne’s insight was that by writing an essay you are placing your thinking outside of your head. You are making your own thought the object of study so that you can improve the rigour and creativity of your thinking. In spite of the breadth of content in his essays, when he published his Essais in 1580 he thus wrote that ‘I am myself the matter of this book’.
Of course, if you have written an essay you can also pass it around, invite others into your thoughts. When you read an essay you are able to get inside someone else’s head, you are able to reconstruct and try on their thoughts – it’s an invitation to critical thinking. Both writing and reading essays can be a training in critical thinking.
The word ‘Essais’ comes from the French verb ‘essayer’ – ‘to try’. Montaigne’s Essais were ‘try-outs’, ‘attempts’ to describe aspects of the human condition and solve human problems. It is one of the most important aspects of his essays that these attempts at thinking were never finished. Montaigne’s Essais were first published in 1580, then again in 1588, and then again 1592. When you look at the later editions of the Essais they are not re-writes in the contemporary sense. The earlier versions are often left intact, but now Montaigne’s new paragraphs reflect on what he said before, sometimes overturning his earlier thinking, sometimes reinforcing it, always attempting to improve that thinking. For Montaigne the thinking undoubtably continued beyond his final edition in 1592 – and only stopped when he died in 1594. For Montaigne the thinking only stopped when he was dead.
Montaigne’s Essais marked the start of a golden age for the essay that lasts 200 years before it starts to go wrong. The essay was a massively important invention that powered the scientific revolution and the enlightenment, the age of reason, and the birth of modern science.
For example, in 1988 when I was an undergraduate philosophy student, the very first essay I was asked to write was on John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke, I was told was one of the greatest of all English thinkers. He didn’t get everything right. For example, he had despicable views on slavery, but on the other hand his political philosophy was the basis of the American constitution, which as we’ve seen, protected democracy in the United States for nearly 250 years.
In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke’s main interest is how we know something, how we know anything at all. And his answer can summed up in his adage that “No man’s knowledge can go beyond his experience.”Locke is an empiricist. He’s quite an extreme empiricist. In an era before science he laid the foundations saying that the only things we can truly know are from our senses, our sight, hearing, taste, and touch. So for example, in terms of the human mind he was what we would now call a behaviourist. We can only know another’s behaviours, not that they have inner states of mind – thoughts and emotions of their own.
Locke first started writing and circulating drafts of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding from 1671. And it took him 18 years of attempts and tries before he was ready to publish in 1689. And then he had another version, another attempt published in 1694, and another in 1695, another in 1700 and a final attempt published in 1706, two years after his death. Attempt after attempt, 18 years of attempts before he published, and then a further five publications of the essay published in the next 17 years. And for Locke the trying, the thinking only finished when he was dead.
In the middle of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding there’s a great passage where John Locke, one of England’s greatest ever thinkers, gets taken in by a talking parrot.
The parrot belongs to the Prince of Nassau and is a truly impressive bird. It is said to be able to hold conversations. If you ask it where it’s from it will tell you that it is from Brazil, it will also tell you it’s owned by a prince, and so on. Locke uses this story to draw a distinction between ‘a man’ and ‘a person’. As a man, I am my animal, biological self. As a person I am a rational being, I have a mind. If a parrot can produce convincing strings of words, then it is a person – it has a mind. This is a reflection of Locke’s empiricist, behaviourist perspective that devalues inner states of others and focusses on empirical observation. The speech sounds are the evidence of a mind.
Obviously this is nuts.
The parrot doesn’t know what ‘Brazil’ means, it doesn’t know that the sounds are speech sounds, that these form a word with an external referent. The parrot does not understand the social and conceptual superstructure of ideas that leads to labelling regions of the planet, to maps and lines on a map that mark out territories as countries with borders. The parrot simply responds to the stimulus, to the prompt, Where are you from? with the response of convincing, grammatically correct but empty speech sounds, that it, the parrot doesn’t even know amount to speech. To the human listener this is words and grammar, but for the parrot it is without meaning. Call and response. The parrot is essentially trained to extrude meaningless but relevant well-formed text.
But not for John Locke, one of England’s greatest ever thinkers.
Let’s move forward from his Essay on Human Understanding to the beginning of the end for the essay, one hundred years later.
It is now 1791 and the scholars at the University of Cambridge are about to perform a dastardly act. They are about to poison the essay as a mechanism to work out and improve thought, as conceived of by Montaigne and used by great thinkers like Locke.
In 1791 the University of Cambridge invents the assessed essay. They introduce the unseen essay exam.
They have their reasons. Previously students were examined by oral ‘disputations’ judged arguments and debates between students. These are time consuming assessments to run. Also, Cambridge was the centre for mathematical learning and it was becoming apparent that in maths, oral argument was perhaps harder to judge, and that a written proof might be better. The introduction of the written essay exam proved massively efficient and enabled the university to grow. There was now mass higher education – ‘matriculations’, graduations, tripled in the next 40 years from about 150 students a year to 450 a year. This was revolutionary for higher education in the same way as since I first enrolled in University, enrollments have also tripled from about 760,000 to 2.8million students a year in the UK. But Cambridge’s introduction of the assessed essay is sheer vandalism to the idea of the essay.
The idea of the assessed essay is inimical to the very idea of the essay in two specific ways.
First, it changes the primary purpose of the essay. The primary purpose since Montaigne is the attempt to improve thinking about interesting problems. Now the primary purpose is to achieve the highest ranking, the highest grade. At first it seems that maybe these two things can be achieved together, but they can and do become separate and the highest grade becomes the priority.
Second, the assessed essay introduces the idea of a due date or an exam date, and this poisons the idea of an essay as an attempt. It changes the essay from a process to a product. From an a ‘essayer’ to an ‘objet’. What student, after the point of submission, continues their thinking on how to improve that specific essay? We all of us who have been students know how rapidly we move on to the next assessment, and the next, and immediately forget the just submitted work.
In spite of the University of Cambridge’s best efforts, at this stage the essay is not killed off, it is not dead, but it is injured and badly deformed by their actions. The death of the essay takes another two hundred years. We move from the 1790s to the late 1990s.
The 1990s see the invention of the internet, the world wide web, and by the year 2000 this new technology is available across most western universities. In turn the internet enables the invention of two wholly new forms of essay writing that world has not seen before. The internet enables the invention of two new forms of plagiarised essay.
First, there is the simple, free form of internet plagiarism where you find a chunk of text online that is useful in your essay, and you copy and paste it and then submit it as your own words. If you get really lucky, some other student at another university has written an entire essay on the topic you’ve been given, and posted it online, and you are able to cut and paste it intact – otherwise there’s always Wikipedia, which was conveniently launched in 2001.
Second, there is the invention of the essay mill, where you might pay a graduate student from across the world to write your essay for you. Commissioned essay writing started with bright, poorer students from the developing world, and quickly got taken over by organised crime.
Outsourcing the writing of your essay, or copying and pasting informative, well-formed text to answer your question, are both creative intelligent solutions to efficiently achieve the primary purpose of the assessed essay – that is to achieve the highest possible grade. But of course it completely detaches the writing from the thinking. From the year 2000 onwards thinking is no longer required to create a high scoring essay.
For Montaigne the thinking only stopped when he was dead. For Locke the thinking only stopped when he was dead. Nevermind the parrot, it is now the essay that is dead. It is deceased. It has cease to exist. It is no more. It is completely dead.
This throws universities into a panic. The primary and most efficient form of assessment for universities is now dead, but because universities are addicted to written assessments, so the essay lives on in zombie form. The zombie essay can be indistinguishable from the truly human essay and can hide amongst the others. Unthinking, sometimes lurching, giving away uncanny clues to its lack of thinking, and generally infecting the student population. Students who want to learn and understand that thinking is hard and must be practised, become disillusioned, aware that these zombie essays often achieve higher grades than their own. And it’s true students seduced by the zombie essays can be awarded high degree classifications through their dabbling in the occult. After all that’s the point of assessment – to get the best possible degree, the highest possible grade.
So Universities face a decision point, they face a choice. Either they can examine their practices, reduce their addiction to written assessments that can be completed without thinking, or, they can invest in the science of zombie detection. They can go down the forensic route, the forensic linguistic route, to distinguish between the zombie essay and the essay produced by hard human thinking.
UK Universities (through an organisation called JISC) initially went down both routes. For six years between 2002 and 2008 they invested in a new Plagiarism Advisory Service. This had two initial remits. The advisory portion provided thinking and advice to universities on how to reform assessments, how to design plagiarism resistant assessments in the age of the internet, and this produced lots of good creative ideas and advice that has developed into interest in authentic assessment today. But today this is a relatively poorly funded niche interest. The Plagiarism Advisory Service also evaluated forensic plagiarism detection services and allowed for the new companies offering these services to bid for a contract. This contract gave all UK universities three years of free access, after which each university would have to pay for such services itself. That contract was won by iParadigms, who offered the TurnItIn system.
I was a young academic in the University of Leicester in 2003, and although I was junior, I was also a forensic linguist, and so I was co-opted onto a university committee that was asked to make the decision as to whether Leicester should adopt this new plagiarism detection software. To the surprise of some of my colleagues, I was the only member of the committee who was arguing agains adoption of TurnItInt. I remember saying that we didn’t want to make assessment more adversarial, more like the courts, that we would start seeing lawyers in disciplinary hearings, and that above all introducing these forensic techniques into universities would damage the relationship between teacher and learner. But I was junior and other views prevailed.
As an aside we all should beware free or unsustainably cheap software that you might become dependent on. After the first free years, universities had to start paying themselves. There’s no very accurate figures, but the estimate is that UK universities now pay between £10M and £20M every year subscribing to plagiarism detection software. This stands as a warning to those accepting free or heavily discounted AI systems into your business or university. In the rush not to be left behind we are missing that these are unfeasible cheap and so the technology companies don’t go bust, prices will have to soar.
And thinking of AI brings us to the present. It was in just 2022 that ChatGPT was released to the public and the world became aware of Large Language Models (or LLMs) – and a new age of panic for universities started.
Let me be clear. My view is the assessed essay died in 2002. The current panic about AI, about the zombie essay in the age of AI, is that this new technology is just revealing that the assessed essay has long since been dead. It wasn’t AI that killed the essay, it was the internet that enabled the efficient production of thinking-free essays. LLMs simply reveal that that the mechanical ability to string words together does not amount to thinking. Producing essays without thought is now just a lot more efficient. We no longer have to go to the trouble of all that internet searching, or finding an essay mill that we can trust. We no longer have to work out how to circumvent the plagiarism detectors. (Generally, that is not that hard, any forensic linguist can provide you with tips!).
Just briefly about LLMs: they are a new and very powerful technology and it’s true that any sufficiently powerful technology will be perceived as magic. Don’t be bewitched by the hype. LLMs are essentially only next word prediction machines. They are essentially very sophisticated auto-complete algorithms. They only differ from prior versions of auto-complete in what they have taken in as the previous words that they use in order to make their prediction of the next word. The objective for most LLMs is that they will have absorbed every previous string of words ever produced and written down by a human being. They take in and process all of the language, then the user produces a little bit more language that they take in and process – ‘the prompt’. And then the LLM maths predicts what the next word should be, and the next one, and the next one. That’s it. One of my favourite linguists to read, who writes about Large Language Models, is Emily Bender form the University of Washington. She was an author on the article that coined the term “stochastic parrot” to describe LLMs. Stocahstic just means probabilistic, and she also uses the term probabilistic Synthetic Text Extrusion Machines (STEMs for short).
LLMs just shows us that the mechanical ability to string words together does not amount to thinking. It is well within their capability to get them to write you an essay about Brazil. But they know no more about Brazil than Locke’s parrot. The LLM doesn’t know what ‘Brazil’ means, it just predicts the words that would make an essay about Brazil, but with no external referent beyond language. The LLM does not understand the social and conceptual superstructure of ideas that leads to labelling regions of the planet, it’s just absorbed the text and predicts which words could be used to express those ideas.
LLMs are just a more efficient means of producing essays without thinking.
So again universities face a decision point, a choice. We can go down the forensic detection route, or we can reform assessments to ensure that thinking is required to get a good grade.
Detecting LLM produced text in student work is often portrayed as a tough problem. And framed that way, as detecting LLM produced text, it is tough and probably a futile endeavour. You are aiming for a moving target – as LLMs improve, you are entering into an arms race with big tech. But if you ask a forensic linguist, the LLM plagiarism problem can be an essay problem to solve. You should not frame the problem as a general categorisation task with human produced language in one set of texts, and AI produced language in another set of texts. This is because human produced language is such a large and varied set of texts, and LLM produced language draws on those texts and produces a text that is a contextually-tuned, averaged version of the human language.
If you ask a forensic linguist, this forensic linguist, you should start with a particular, specific human, and then model their language style. You could take a first-year student, for example, writing in a room without a computer, and you start with that text. Later if they submit a text produced with LLM assistance, or wholly written by LLM, it is easy to perform an authorship analysis that measures that shift in style. At the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, we have already developed Aston-made software that can easily perform this kind of authorship analysis. These are the systems that we apply to criminal cases, cases involving murderers, terrorists or paedophiles writing on the dark web. Our evidence is often accepted in court and can help convict the guilty or acquit the innocent. Naturally to apply this approach to essay writing students you would have to produce a language model for every student that enrolled, and this would be a time consuming system to set up, and expensive. But if you pay me £10M – £20M a year I can do that for you. I can produce software and a governance system to achieve this individual surveillance of every enrolled students’ language style.
Who knows such a system might have wider uses – the police could serve a warrant to access the language model if they suspect a student (or ex-student) of some crime or some online harm. It would become a library of human language styles much like a DNA database or fingerprint database.
But even beyond the ethics and civil liberties aspects of this, even beyond the issue of introducing students to the university with a declaration of such an adversarial relationship, this is not what we should be doing.
The forensic LLM detection route fails to recognise that the problem is not how the text was technically produced – with a pen, or a word-processor, or an LLM – the problem is the separation between writing and thinking. When our students graduate, they will for the next 40+ years of their careers be using all the technologies available to them to progress in their lives, and we hope they will use their creativity and the available technologies to make a positive mark on the world. We should not be setting them written assessments and essays and demanding that they write them like it’s the year 1990. This is no preparation or foundation for their contribution to the rest of the 21st century.
Universities should make the harder choice the choice to reform the entire process of assessment. We should find ways to enable students to use technologies and complete them in such a way that that thinking and learning is required to score highly. Universities should ensure that it is the creative and rigorous thinking that is assessed. This is a hard problem, but academics and universities round the world are already tackling it. There are already suggestions and ideas ready for investment. This is where our hard cash and hard thinking should be directed.
As a post-script, a few sentences ago I said that LLMs show us that the mechanical ability to string words together does not amount to thinking. AI advocates would have it that these Synthetic Text Extrusion Machines (STEMs) are in fact thinking machines. Tim Altman, founder of OpenAI, responded to Emily Bender about three years ago with a tweet that said “I am a stochastic parrot and so r u”. This is nonsense – LLMs know no more about Brazil than Locke’s parrot.
Locke’s parrot is instructive here in our response to what is claimed as artificial intelligence. We should ask the question Why did John Locke get taken in by a talking parrot? and the answer is interesting. Although John Locke may be one of the greatest thinkers England has ever produced, he is also human. It is a function of our humanity as meaning-making creatures that we like to project meaning and meaning-making onto the world. We create gods and monsters in fire and shadow, we speak to our plants and our cars, we endow non-human creatures and inanimate objects with personalities. Where another creature or a machine or an algorithm produces language, this tendency is amplified. I say please and thank you to my digital assistant, for fun, and because it feels like the interaction demands it. We project a mind onto a talking parrot because the way we see the world requires that all language producers must have a mind, must be a person. This has been usefully referred to as an asymmetric interaction. The provision of meaning in th talk between the two interactants interaction is one-sided. And the same is true of our interactions with LLMs, with these Synthetic Text Extrusion Machines. STEMs need our humanity to appear to have minds.
And this is the thought I finish with – STEM needs the humanities.
The real crisis in today’s universities is not the death of the essay but the potential death of difficult, human, critical thinking. In universities the kind of thinking that we need in the age of AI is centred in arts, humanities and social science faculties. The disciplines that traditionally write essays. We see the death of thinking institutionally reflected in the devaluing, the defunding, and the death of these faculties in the across universities in the UK. But to think about this crisis properly would require another talk, another attempt, another essay.
