In writing classrooms of the 20th and 21st centuries, the usual lessons are well known: “Less is more.” “Remove superfluous words.” “Clear and direct language is always best.” But, in the face of machine learning and predictive text, the time may be right to practice our techniques for invention and surprise. Cue up a new era of different guidelines for writing—specifically, the writing “exercise.” Take Sally O’Reilly’s exercise, which encourages us to “rewild” sentences. Here, in her exercise, she urges us to write a sentence in imitation of an animal species:

Select the creature that you’d like your sentence to become.

What is its biology?

Is it cold blooded?

Does it have skin, fur, feathers, carapace?

Is it musky?

What is its gait?

Does it zigzag sharply?

Is it shaggy, stocky, and lumbering?

Why rewild a sentence? “The unwary writer can reproduce familiar figures that follow well-trodden paths,” explains O’Reilly of her exercise. “Dull patterns of tone and movement can set in.” The idea of her exercise is “to curb the instinct for ease. Be complicating.”

To make writers and writing instructors a little less predictable is the aim of two new books of writing exercises. In The Virtual Sentence: A Book of Exercises, eight original exercises are presented by eight authors (including O’Reilly’s “rewilding” exercise above), each accompanied by a miniature essay. All are “meant as a renewed stimulus to the human faculty of linguistic prediction.” Meanwhile, Writing: 50 Exercises for the College Classroom collects 50 new exercises by different instructors that put the focus on academic writing across multiple disciplines. By nature a less artistic and more utilitarian project than The Virtual Sentence, it advocates a similar spirit of play.

It makes sense that humanists and creative writers would turn their attention back to writing exercises in the 2020s. These days we are all in the perpetual condition (hell?) of giving and receiving prompts to and from our machines. ChatGPT and its siblings have taken writing prompts to the next level, as though we are all composition teachers or setters of exams eager to see what our robot students come up with. What a perfect time to become “complicated.”

All this automation could make us reconsider what we like about the manual aspects of writing. It’s a bit like the challenge photography presented to drawing and painting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: it didn’t eliminate these techniques, but it did make people rethink what they wanted from them.

“The genre of the exercise,” explains Jeff Dolven in The Virtual Sentence, is “a miniature ritual of permutation and invention … meant to generate rather than to stipulate.” The word exercise toggles between experiment and training, and it has an “equivocal relationship to habit and to style.” On the one hand it reinforces traditions, while on the other it can catalyze a break from dogma.

The exercise has long had a place in the humanistic tradition. One thinks of the spiritual exercises of the Jesuits, or Erasmus’s advice to try “two hundred variations on the epistolary sign-off ‘I will always remember you.’” But the word prompt, used in the context of writing instruction, is of more recent vintage. In the 1970s, this small word acquired two new uses: the “writing prompt,” deployed by teachers and professors; and the “computer prompt,” appearing on a screen and inviting you to enter instructions.

I remember being given both kinds of prompt in my 1980s classroom, whether by my French immersion teacher wearing a Talbots suit with brass buttons, or by the Commodore 64 computer newly installed in the corner. The human and the machine seem locked in an endless cycle of prompting. The machines goad us to fill out surveys about our experience of everything, from buying a pack of gum to open-heart surgery, and we prompt them to tell us how to get places, or to write amusing things that we can screencap and post online.

Enter The Virtual Sentence, published by Cabinet Books, which encourages us to set more prompts for human writers and to write in response to them. The book is, in fact, a binder with metal fasteners (a doggedly physical device, one might note, without an obvious online equivalent), which allows the reader to add new exercises in the future.

The exercises themselves direct us to write different kinds of sentences, specifically, and the form occasionally recalls the instruction-based artworks of Dadaist and Fluxus artists. Kyle Booten asks us to decide on the total number of words an unwritten sentence will have, and to assign the choice of each word to a date on the calendar with any amount of time between them: “Writing sentences in this manner could take months, years, decades, or longer.” Another asks you to reverse Joan Didion’s apprenticeship in writing pithy captions for Vogue photographs, undermining the “spareness, concision, elegance” that we are so often taught to prize. Rather than chiseling sentences to a lapidary shine, Brian Dillon suggests, we might expand them, dilating the caption until Anna Wintour vomits.

The volume values mess. The point of Dillon’s captions is “roughing [sentences] up instead of polishing them.” Dolven celebrates the “advisedly inefficient” aspect of all the exercises in the binder.

Reading through the exercises, one is left with a stronger sense than ever that we may be entering a different turn of literary modernism (a new era of “make it new,” as Ezra Pound said). The parallel between our own age of machine writers and the age of photography is also striking. As photographic technology produced “smoother” images than had hitherto been available, artists began to emphasize the facture and evidence of the artist’s body in their images. The Virtual Sentence offers a similar course: the idea is to impede smooth writing, to clog and gnarl our words so that they could not be mistaken for the eerily frictionless tones of the large language models.

A less evident theme is exhaustion. The contributors plead for exhausting our normal ways of doing things to get at something more authentic and richer; they also suggest that we are exhausted with trying so hard to be original and unique. “The discovery of the most important variations,” Dolven argues, “begins at the moment when habitual resources for variation are exhausted.”

Indeed, the subtitle of the binder might be “Exercises for the Exhausted.” Elena Vogman’s exercise is based on the work of Viktor Shklovsky following his “exhausting work at the Third State Cinema Factory,” of which he wrote that “my whole head is stuffed with bits and pieces of movies. Like the film bin in a cutting room. A peripheral life.” And he began to make collages of other people’s sentences. Vogman instructs us to do something similar: to take quotations from books quoting other books, and to rearrange them in a new montage.

These two books of exercises don’t merely call for the preservation of old forms amid new technology. They also renew our sense of what these tried and tested techniques can do.

A sense of fatigue with efficiency also runs through another, more avowedly pedagogical book of exercises. The Pocket Instructor: Writing: 50 Exercises for the College Classroom is Princeton University Press’s follow-up to the 2015 book The Pocket Instructor: Literature: 101 Exercises for the College Classroom, which should win a National Book Award simply for the time it has saved me in prepping classes. This new volume is decidedly more interdisciplinary than the earlier Pocket Instructor, since the activities included would work in social science, earth science, and humanities classrooms.

Aligned with the goal of complicating and twisting our thoughts into unexpected shapes, the work challenges students to become something other than “faster” and “more efficient” writers. The editors want to “decouple fast writing from good writing” and to encourage students to embrace some of the “structured chaos” that all acts of writing presuppose.

The exercises here depend upon a common thread of a “writing lexicon,” which gives students a shared vocabulary for what academic writing includes: motive, thesis, analysis, evidence, sources, key terms, method, structure, conventions, orienting, mechanics, style, ethos. The subsections of the book reflect the writing process: starting, drafting, revising, and transferring. The activities suggested include “Rock Your Classroom,” which encourages students to “close read” a rock in a geological vein and then to do the same with a short poem, showcasing the overlap and differences between different kinds of description in other fields. The nondescript title of “Building Original Arguments” belies a game in which students use Lego blocks to represent the elements of complex arguments.

At times the exercises lean hard on the structured side of “structured chaos,” since they are heavily scaffolded and sometimes lack the brio of the Pocket Instructor: Literature volume. I enjoyed the impromptu and creative features of that earlier volume, whose activities allowed you to relieve some of the tedium of the schedule without wheeling in the AV equipment to watch the BBC Pride and Prejudice while you catch up on grading and sigh. Some of the quickest and dirtiest have worked well in my own classroom, such as getting students to write a question on a scrap of paper and throw it randomly across the room in a kind of snowball fight, with the classmate who picks each up attempting to answer the anonymous question they find.

Adaptable to different levels of preparation and ability, the exercises do depend upon a level of student engagement easier to take for granted at Princeton than at, say, a community college. The editors’ description of the exercises as easily adapted to online contexts didn’t convince me either, especially when they note that the exercises take almost twice as long there: “As a general guide, convert a fifty-minute exercise into an eighty-minute exercise, and plan an eighty-minute exercise to require two hours.” Despite the value the editors place on “slow” writing, this concession undervalues the improvisatory efficiency of the live classroom.

Why would we not defend and celebrate the live amid technological overwhelm? I am increasingly happy when cultural events can be deemed successful without leaving a single trace or mention on social media. Classroom instructors might borrow from Broadway a little bit in marketing their wares. Just as there is no substitute for live theater, there is no substitute for a live classroom. The format has worked for millennia.

Writing sentences without AI has worked for just as long. These two books of exercises don’t merely call for the preservation of old forms amid new technology. They also renew our sense of what these tried and tested techniques can do.