Maybe no one has ever looked at a pile of papers with unbridled joy, but in a time of university-subsidized LLMs, instructors are more likely view a stack of papers with a mix of dread and horror. How many made up quotations will I have to check? How many fake citations? How many versions of “it’s not ___, it’s ___” can I read before my soul leaves my body?

To teach writing now is to be reminded too forcefully of the critique of writing that Plato relays in the Phaedrus: “it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.” 

Plato captures here complaints that writing teachers pestered by LLM-extruded prose should recognize immediately. Many writing teachers have responded to the creation of the semblance of wisdom and its corrosive production of conceit by turning to the solution offered in Plato: the voice.

This roundtable invites participants who have shifted their pedagogy to center discussion, dialogue, oral presentation, and other forms of embodied communication in response to the depredations of LLMs in higher education. How has this use of voice affected how students write and how we think about their writing?

Submit abstracts of 250 words by September 30, 2026 to https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22506.

For inquiries, contact Joshua Gooch (goochj@dyc.edu) or Sara Sullivan (ssulliva@sbu.edu).