In 1955 a readability researcher named Rudolf Flesch published a book called Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do About It. Harper and Brothers put it out. It stayed on the bestseller list for thirty-seven weeks.
Flesch’s target was the look-say method, which had quietly replaced phonics in American classrooms. Children were no longer taught that letters make sounds. They were taught to recognize whole words on sight, memorizing them one at a time out of books about Dick and Jane, who ran and jumped and saw Spot run inside a vocabulary of a few hundred words.
It was an experiment. It was conducted on a generation of children. Nobody asked them.
I was one of them. I still cannot spell.
What I Use, and Where I Stop
So when I write, the essays and the keynotes and the articles, I run the result through Grammarly. It fixes spelling and punctuation. That is the whole of it.
The thinking is mine. The research is mine. The argument is mine, including the parts of it that turn out to be wrong. The sentences are mine, in the order I put them in.
I tell you this for a specific reason. I spend my working life asking what these machines are doing to the people who use them. A man who asks that question in public owes you an account of what the machines are doing to him. This is mine.
Where the Line Falls
The site itself is different work. These pages, the structure of them, the descriptions of the talks, the wording of the furniture around the writing, I have built with editorial help, and AI tools are part of that help. So is some of the research behind it: dates verified, citations chased down, my own errors caught and corrected.
The writing is the part I am talking about above. The essays, the keynotes, the articles that go out under my name. Those are mine, and Grammarly is where the machine’s involvement in them ends.
I would rather tell you where the line falls than let you assume it falls somewhere else.
My wife, a retired English and journalism teacher, assures me the software is cheaper and considerably less frustrating than her proofreading. She is right about that.
Who I Write For
I write for everyday people trying to work out what life is about in a world changing under emerging technology. For readers interested in Joseph Cardijn and his work. For readers who come to Thomas Merton looking for some account of why any of this is happening.
And for the parents sitting in a pew on Sunday morning with children who really do not want to be there.
I write about cultural change because I am first a cultural historian who wandered into emerging technology and found a career there. Not every piece is obviously about technology. The question is in all of them.
Some are more direct than others: the good, the bad, and the ugly of living alongside machines that keep confronting us with what it means to be human, and the difference it makes.
Flesch’s book did not fix my spelling. Nothing has. But it taught me early what it feels like to be on the receiving end of somebody’s good idea about how people ought to be improved.
That is more or less the question I have been asking ever since.