The point of Donald Clark's article is to offer what I guess we can call 'the standard argument': "Generating words, knowledge and solutions is better than simply reading, highlighting text or getting AI to do it for you. Acts of personal generation provide the context for greater understanding and subsequent recall.... This is a short-term pain, long-term gain idea, where desirable difficulties are learning challenges that make the learner study harder in the short term to improve long-term retention and understanding." He then offers an eight-step approach to writing essays along these lines. It's funny, but I would do the eight steps in reverse order - write a version, test my conclusion, identify what's missing, etc. The idea that you use your writing to reason things out and to reach a conclusion is, in my mind, just wrong.
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