More Than Words argues that generative AI programs like ChatGPT not only can kill the student essay but should, since these assignments don’t challenge students to do the real work of writing. To Warner, writing is thinking—discovering your ideas while trying to capture them on a page—and feeling—grappling with what it fundamentally means to be human.

Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn't prepared them for writing in the college classroom.

After a decade of teaching writing using the same methods he’d experienced as a student many years before, writer, editor, and educator John Warner realized he could do better. Drawing on his classroom experience and the most persuasive research in contemporary composition studies, he devised an innovative new framework: a step-by-step method that moves the student through a series of writing problems, an organic, bottom-up writing process that exposes and acculturates them to the ways writers work in the world.

Colleges exist to enroll students, collect tuition, and hold classes. When learning happens, it is in spite of the system, not because of it. In Sustainable. Resilient. Free., John Warner envisions a future in which our public colleges and universities are reoriented around enhancing the intellectual, social, and economic potentials of students while providing broad-based benefits to the community at large. As Warner explains, it's not even complicated. It's no more costly than the current system. We just have to choose to live the values we claim to hold dear.

The stories in John Warner's Tough Day for the Army move from hilarious and biting to unsettling and sad -- sometimes within the span of a few pages. Mining the absurdities, confusions, and hypocrisies of our contemporary times, these stories raise questions such as: What would happen if Jesus Christ played minor league hockey before he became the Son of God ("Second Careers")? What would you do if a group of poets in search of inspiration appeared on your farm ("Poet Farmers")?