What disruption reveals

It’s an article of faith among many fundraising executives: Keep it short. Nobody reads anymore.

It’s not wrong, exactly. The direct marketers who tried to send fundraising emails as long as their letters — these letters can run eight pages or more — learned the hard way that email is a different medium. That people consume email differently than mail.

(Consider Jeff Brooks’ image of Aunt Ruth settling into her comfy chair to read her mail. Nobody settles into a chair to read email.)

But the people who took “keep it short” as the whole lesson often found their short fundraising emails equally ineffective. Not because they were short, but because they were only short. They’d edited out the emotional argument — the part that actually moves someone to give.

Direct mail wasn’t long because readers were more patient in 1985. It was long because building a case for why someone should care — and care deeply enough to write a check — requires space. The length wasn’t a feature of the medium but a reflection of human nature.

Email changed the form. The reader remained the same.

What AI is doing to writing in education looks similar to what email did to direct mail.

Teachers who’ve spent years assigning take-home essays are watching students produce polished work they didn’t write. The form — the overnight research paper, the five-paragraph essay — is being disrupted.

Some educators are banning AI entirely, doubling down on old forms and hoping enforcement holds. This misses the point.

The take-home essay was never really about the essay. It was about forcing students to think through the material and demonstrate they’d learned it.

The most interesting educators aren’t the ones fighting AI. They’re the ones asking what writing is actually for and redesigning their lessons around that.

That’s what disruption does. It strips away the form — the multi-page letter, the essay — and leaves intact the problem the form was always trying to solve.