Step Back Writing

I’m currently listening to Small Teaching by James M. Lang, so I’ve got baseball metaphors on the brain. Lang’s organizing framework for the pedagogy that he’s advancing is “small ball,” all the baseball maneuvers that consistently lead to positive outcomes but are not flashy. Think bunting and stealing bases as opposed to home runs and grand slams. Lang’s idea is that big pedagogical impact can come from small changes, modifications that aren’t flashy but that you could implement tomorrow.

I had a very short and mediocre career as a little league baseball player. If memory serves, I got hit with the ball once and it was all over. I was afraid of pitches forever, and I quickly lost interest in playing due to a fear of bodily harm. The physical “trauma” meant that I just could not find any joy—any play—in the sport. My other main little league memory is a particular exercise that we used to do for throwing that I’ve seen online described as “step back throwing.”

The idea behind step back throwing is pretty straightforward. Two people start fairly close together. One person throws the ball to the other. If it’s a successful catch, you take a step back to increase the distance. You repeat this process such that you gradually move farther and farther apart. If you ever drop the ball, you pause or take a step forward to close the distance. The process develops your ability to throw at longer distances. Once you reach the upper limit of your ability, you’ll hover around exactly the space that you need to work on. Lots of meaningful practice just where you need it.

I want to put this baseball pedagogy conversation in dialogue with Miriam Posner’s reflections on teaching writing in the AI over on Bluesky:

One way of thinking about it is, why wouldn’t *I* use ChatGPT to write a paper? 1. It’s a matter of self-respect. 2. I believe my writing says something basic about who I am. 3. I believe research and writing are valuable activities. +

— Miriam Posner (@miriamposner.com) June 3, 2025 at 12:39 PM

+ 4. I don’t want to contribute to a harmful industry. 5. I can write better than ChatGPT. So, in some ways, our question should be: how do we get students to a point where these things are true for them, too?

— Miriam Posner (@miriamposner.com) June 3, 2025 at 12:39 PM

I love Posner’s list, which does a great job of pointing out reasons why we might articulate to students the need to care about writing. I want to add one other point: writing can be fun. For so many people writing feels painful, but it need not be that way. Would it help articulate the value of writing if our pedagogies re-introduced joy? So often writing feels like a high stakes chore for students, but how can we reintroduce play into the process?

I’m interested in the kinds of exercises, writing or otherwise, that can reintroduce ludic constraints to the work. Here’s one idea, based on the baseball metaphor I can’t stop thinking about. I’m calling it “step back writing.”

Take a particular course topic, book, or article, and write a three-word sentence on it. Then, repeat the process iteratively, adding a word each time. So you start out with three words, then four, then five, etc. You might start with different versions of the same sentence, but the sentence will inevitably grow and develop in new ways and become something else entirely. Pick a certain point at which you stop lengthening (in this example I arbitrarily stopped at twenty words). You could stop there, but try instead to iterate backwards, shaving off one word at a time. Be careful not to just copy and paste the same sentences in reverse, the goal is to wind up with a different three-word phrase at the end.

Here’s an example, where I start out with a three-word phrase, iterate up one word at a time, then go back down:

• Writing is joy.
• Writing can be fun.
• Surprisingly, writing can be fun.
• Make writing fun for your students
• Can you try to make writing fun?
• Why would you try to make writing fun?
• Writing does not have to be like pulling teeth.
• When was the last time you hated your own writing?
• Who was it that made you find love in your writing?
• For me, the most important part of writing has always been motivation.
• Motivation is the process of rewarding effort with something that you care about.
• Unfortunately, part of the challenge is that everyone will get motivation from different things.
• I always paid the most attention to the teachers who brought joy into the classroom.
• Some might view a pedagogy of joy as unserious, but joy can come from many things.
• I am not suggesting that you bring a persona into the classroom that feels inauthentic to you.
• It could be argued that writing is serious business, but why not help students find other ways in?
• What do we need to know about students’ lives to make them care about the work that we do?
• Of course, you have to be true to your own teaching persona, and this might not make sense for you.
• I think it could it be worth asking students if working with AI to write sparks joy for them.
• If writing doesn’t bring a sense of pleasure to students, what might that say about the writing instruction?
• Is writing something we teach our students at all, or is it just something that happens offstage?
• Can we blame students for looking for writing instruction elsewhere if it isn’t in the classroom?
• What is AI teaching our students about the written word and why is that attractive?
• How can we show students a kind of writing that heals past writing traumas?
• Most students probably find writing to be just a hurdle to jump through.
• Why do some avoid hurdles while others go on to become hurdlers?
• ChatGPT offers fast-food writing for our students—easily generated and easily consumed.
• How can students slow down and sit with their writing?
• What is the first introduction to writing for students?
• Was it something that made their hearts sing?
• How do we make them care again?
• What does it mean to play?
• What can make writing playful?
• Why do we play?
• What motivates students?

The exercise was something of a pain to go through at times, but it started to feel like poetry by the end. And while you could certainly dump this kind of exercise into a ChatGPT prompt, that’s not quite a concern here. My goal is explicitly not to develop writing exercises that are somehow AI-proofed, that students can’t execute with a tool. Instead, I want to think further about why we write, how we talk about it, and how we instill different kinds of relationships to it with the exercises we offer students. Afterwards, we might ask our students to vote on who wrote the most moving three-word sentence, or for the clearest sentence of greatest length. We can make a game of it. Joy and play certainly aren’t the only reasons we write, and they won’t be the primary frames for many instructors. But perhaps creative approaches to writing instruction can help students to re-evaluate their own relationship to the written word.