The popular imagination of AI-assisted writing tends toward fluency. Writers are promised a seamless co-author, one that generates, suggests, and refines without complaint. My own writing loop resists this story. Friction, in my experience, is not an exception to be smoothed over; it is a constitutive feature of working with generative AI. This piece thinks through those moments of breakdown; the hesitations, refusals, and quiet negotiations that structure my encounters with AI suggestion, and argues that attending to them carefully reveals something important about who these tools are built for, what kinds of knowledge they recognize, and where rhetorical power…
Author: Shuvro Das
Shuvro Das
Shuvro Das is a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric and Writing program at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on Technical and Professional Communication, Pedagogy, Non-Western Rhetoric, Intercultural Communication, Cultural Rhetoric, and Writing Across the Curriculum. He teaches First Year Writing, Writing from Research, and Technical Writing.
I used to teach technical writing the traditional way that focused on clarity, conciseness, and correctness. Documents were neutral containers for information. Accessibility was a checklist item, something you added at the end if you remembered. Then I watched a student create a beautiful user manual that no screen reader could parse. Another created a video tutorial with no captions. They had followed my instructions perfectly. The problem wasn’t their work. It was mine. Now my classes start with a different premise. Before we discuss audience analysis or document design, we examine who gets excluded and why. I ask students…