Reading a lot is often considered a sign of good reading comprehension. If a child or teenager reads several books a month, it seems logical to assume they read easily and understand what they read well. After all, how could someone read so much without good comprehension? But we take for granted something that isn’t […] … learn more→
Blog Archives
Is it possible to read many books and have reading comprehension difficulties?
Writing for well‑being: How it could be a new way to teach the essay and resist AI
Writing the dreaded English essay spikes anxiety for thousands of students, but is there a way for writing to boost students’ well-being instead? I wanted to know if a new approach to teaching literary studies could tap into the feel-good side of writing and make essays a path to wellness, so I designed an English course […] … learn more→
Is reading your favourite hobby? A new era of book clubs is reshaping how we read
Reading is experiencing a resurgence among Gen Z and millennials, many of whom are actively seeking alternatives to “doomscrolling” and the mental fatigue associated with constant social media use. In North America, an estimated 57 to 61 per cent of Gen Z and millennials identify as readers, averaging 3.5 to 4.5 books per year, with a preference for physical […] … learn more→
Thousands of AI‑written, edited or ‘polished’ books are being sold – an eerie echo of Orwell’s ‘novel‑writing machines’
At some point in the next several months, I am hoping to receive a modest check as a member of the class covered in the class-action settlement Bartz v. Anthropic. In 2025, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, best known for creating the chatbot Claude, agreed to pay up to US$1.5 billion to thousands of authors after a judge ruled that […] … learn more→
In the Middle Ages, women (also) took up the pen
The Middle Ages often appears as a dark period for women: cloistered in obscure monasteries or subject to their husbands, they were supposedly kept away from power and any form of written culture. This cliché, like many others about the so-called Dark Ages, emerged during the Renaissance and developed within the Enlightenment. However, during the […] … learn more→
“Corrective literature”: when literary characters break their silence
At the end of October 2025, a new adaptation of a literary work was released in theaters: “The Stranger,” by Albert Camus, revisited by François Ozon. This cinematic event reminded us, once again, that fictional characters can have a life that escapes their creator, to the point that we sometimes want to believe they are […] … learn more→
Too many em dashes? Weird words like ‘delves’? Spotting text written by ChatGPT is still more art than science
People are now routinely using chatbots to write computer code, summarize articles and books, or solicit advice. But these chatbots are also employed to quickly generate text from scratch, with some users passing off the words as their own. This has, not surprisingly, created headaches for teachers tasked with evaluating their students’ written work. It’s also created issues for people seeking advice […] … learn more→
How poetry can help to fight polarisation and misinformation
People are becoming more divided and ill informed. In January 2024, a report by the World Economic Forum identified misinformation and disinformation as “the most severe global risk anticipated over the next two years”. As a result, it predicted “perceptions of reality are likely to also become polarised” – and that unrest resulting from unreliable information may […] … learn more→
Why AI can’t take over creative writing
In 1948, the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, proposed modelling language in terms of the probability of the next word in a sentence given the previous words. These types of probabilistic language models were largely derided, most famously by linguist Noam Chomsky: “The notion of ‘probability of a sentence’ is an entirely useless one.” In 2022, […] … learn more→
On not writing bad writing advice
When I started this blog thirteen years ago I wanted to provide advice and resources about academic writing and doctoral research. Along the way I sometimes meandered into more general academic issues and occasionally things that were more about me. Sometimes I shared what I was writing. As in the last post where I posted […] … learn more→
