The Human Isolation Disease is Spreading

by Haley Boston, student blogger, Northwestern University Class of 2016

Picture this: a computer grades a commentary about the severe lack of personal connection in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Ironic, isn’t it?  

I have read countless articles detailing the new generation’s lack of “human connection” due to a plethora of advances in social technologies. Some of my friends are better acquainted through Twitter than face-to-face; in fact, they shy away from physical confrontation, worried that their real appearances won’t amount to their online, text-edited personalities. The popular means of communication these days give us the illusion of complete connection when we are really more isolated. Isn’t the new editing software, as detailed in this New York Times article, another step in that direction? Parents reprimand their teens for texting during family dinners. We are scolded for using Facebook while writing an essay. We spend hours discussing literature in an English class, yet our teachers run our carefully constructed essays through a machine that spits out this amount of A’s, and that amount of B’s? 

Teachers are human. Even when they grade papers, they have biases. Person A always writes coherent sentences, speaks up in class, and reads the text, so Person A must have delivered a wonderful college-level essay. There is also the comparative bias, when two students write essays on the same topic and Student A’s essay was relatively more concise than Student B’s. True, these are issues that a machine-editor could avoid. However, it seems as if eliminating yet another human contact in our young, impressionable lives is not worth the efficiency. A machine cannot read the emotional toll a personal narrative has on the reader. A machine cannot be truly persuaded based on the arguments made in a typical SAT essay. 

As an aspiring writer and recent graduate from Oregon’s most prestigious public high school, I have benefited from the relationships I established with my English teachers. My Junior IB English teacher had a way about grading essays. He’d say that the essay should take him on a journey, that he should be able to follow a seamless path through the essay, and if he hit a tree along the way, it was an automatic C. His description taught me that editing is a process. Every English teacher has a different grading style, and each year I had to adjust my analytical approach to satisfy those styles. This helped me become a better adaptive writer. Imagine that you, a sixth-grader, are taught that “good essays” always have complex sentences, five paragraphs, and are organized by literary technique. You figure this formula out in middle school and it works in high school as well, because your teachers don’t read your essays, they are just tossed into cyberspace to be graded by a data-processing robot. What will you do when you get to college and Professor X wants a seven-paragraph comparison essay organized by idea, not technique? 

I was recently able to identify the extent to which English students are programmed. I tried to do something different with my essays, to add a creative twist at the risk of receiving an 89% on an analytical essay because it was “too complicated.” So I tried again. I was given an 89% on a commentary that was “too simple.” Would I have received a higher grade if a computer edited my essay instead? Would it have recognized that it is sometimes O.K. to split a thesis statement into multiple sentences? 

From what I have witnessed these past few years, most English teachers prepare engaging class discussions with their own thoughts on literature. In a way, I think the analytical essay is meant to demonstrate the worth of the class discussion. It is, in part, a thank-you-nod to the teacher. Robotic editing eliminates the student-teacher relationship. For a student like myself, it would subsequently eliminate motivation (I like to try and impress my teachers). Without motivation, without this ominous “human connection,” where are we now?