I say this in almost every workshop I run, and I’ve started paying attention to the moment it lands. There’s usually a pause. Sometimes a visible shift. Because most people walk into a writing workshop believing that thinking happens first and writing happens after. You figure out what you want to say, and then you write it down.
That’s not how it works. Not for most academic writing, and honestly not for most writing of any kind. The writing is where the thinking happens. The false starts, the overwriting, the parts you delete, those aren’t wasted effort. They’re the thinking. A writer who drafts a section has a document and an understanding. A writer who asks someone else (or something else) to draft that section has only a document.
This comes up most urgently in conversations about AI. When I run the AI and writing workshop, the version of this I use is: cognitive offloading occurs when an external tool performs thinking you would otherwise do yourself. That sounds neutral, but the consequence is that you end up with prose you can’t defend and ideas you didn’t form. The discomfort of difficult drafting is a signal that substantive intellectual work is occurring. The fact that AI can remove that discomfort is not straightforwardly a good thing.
It also shows up in paraphrasing. The common advice is “put it in your own words,” which I’d file next to “use commas when you need to take a breath.” It’s not wrong exactly, but it treats the task as mechanical when the real work is conceptual. Your reason for using a source should guide how you paraphrase it. That only works if you’ve actually done the thinking about why you’re using it. Which means writing through it, not around it.
I do not have a final conclusion here, only a conviction that keeps proving useful. When students tell me they are stuck, the most useful thing I can usually say is that the trouble may be in the thinking, and the way through may require writing badly for a while until the idea clarifies.