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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they)

@writerethink.bsky.social
2.1K followers 1.4K following 1.9K posts

linguist / cognitive scientist / writing professor obsessed with all things relating to language, learning, and the mind. And knitting and sewing and music (especially violin and ukulele). And cats. Also a UU. neurodivergent. she/they. 🌈💖💜💙 /🖤🤍💜

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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 10h
It just occurred to me that in this instance, Muse kinda *was* my muse, in that I doubt it would ever have occurred to me to recreate that photo in crayon if not for that ridiculous ad it shoved into my feed. Not sure how I feel about that!
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 13h
It occurs to me that "Thanks, I made it!" applies to the drawing, the sweaters in the original photo, and even the BABY in the original photo! (Now an absolutely awesome teenager!)
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 13h
I am nothing if not stubborn, and so I decided to make good on my claim that I'd dig out old crayons and draw it myself. Is it a masterpiece? I mean, I hadn't drawn in decades and it shows, and old broken crayons are a challenging medium, but driven by spite and curiosity, I made it my damned self.
A crayon depiction of a photograph of myself holding my infant daughter, wearing matching rainbow-striped sweaters. At the bottom, written in all-caps, are the words "THANKS, I MADE IT!"
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
We watch @jamellebouie.net’s Takes on YouTube and for some reason, the captions occasionally come up in (well-translated!) Dutch. It’s mostly entertaining & delightful to our household of linguists, but…why are the captions defaulting to Dutch??
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Something about the room lighting made my knee bruises look extra green, which was…neat? I mean, if I’m gonna be all banged up at least I can try to enjoy all the fun colors I get to experience?
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Went to urgent care after my meetings with students today and got my shin gouge checked out…no fractures in the bone underneath (yay!) but some signs of infection (boo!) so they cleaned it out super well (ow!) and now I get to take a bunch of Keflex for the next 5 days (oh, my poor guts!)
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I've been feeling so scatterbrained and I guess that's not surprising given that I've been in pain for 10 days, which has meant not sleeping well for 10 days, and also not doing my usual morning exercise, which I suspect functions for me like my kid's ADHD meds do for her. So...yeah.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
…Kiddo heard me deliberating about what to do, and sweetly offered to hop over there after cross country practice to pick it up for me before walking home. What an incredible human I’m raising!
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
…and I started crying, both because I just want to be able to walk normally AND because I dreaded trying to do the two uncontrolled left turns necessary to stop by the library on my drive home from campus…
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I have the sweetest child. I had this book on hold and it became available the day I fell last week. I normally walk the mile to the library on Wednesdays, but haven’t been able to because of my injuries, and I got the notification last night that I had to pick it up before end of day today…
I am holding up a library copy of Ian Bogost’s “The Small Stuff”, a book with an Orange cover, with a somewhat pained looking smile on my face.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Between thinking about the Cornell case, watching Taylor Swift’s masterful depiction of narcissistic abuse (that car scene in Patient Zero takes my breath away) and the fact that I’ve been walking around with a literal open wound on my shin for 1.5 weeks…I feel like one big raw nerve right now.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
This is so great!!
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Reposted by Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they)
maura quint @mauraquint.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Yes every woman has been harassed, many assaulted. But every woman has also experienced invisible loss from moments she avoided harassment. She felt a space becoming unsafe, so she left, while men stayed on. And in leaving, she lost: opportunities, experiences, learning, promotions, even simply fun.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
It's been hard to get a solid night's sleep since my fall, because no matter how I lay I'm pushing against some bruise or other injury, and ooof, I'm feeling it at this point, 9 days later. Feels like I'm thinking through soup. (Also still going nuts from not being able to sit all folded up!)
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
do men understand the extent to which women are ready to burn it all down right now
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
(It’s also just such a cramped space, as might be obvious from the fact that it contains not just the exercise bike and Nordic Track, but also the drying rack, our outdoor bikes, and a seed-starting shelf. And it is NOT a big room!)
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I think it’s both worry about another mouse encounter and just feeling weirdly upset seeing the Nordic Track sitting askew. (The hole it put in my shin is still not fully closed up, more than a week later!)
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
My fall last week shook me up more than I expected…just tried to take laundry down to the drying rack in that room, opened the door, and was like “nope, not going in here without a buddy.”
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Reposted by Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they)
Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Tech industry is laser focused on solving the problem of humans enjoying each other’s company bsky.app/profile/down...
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Tauriq Moosa @tauriq.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The thing I've always wanted for music is for it to be... solved. Have these weirdos ever engaged with art from a human level?
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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Many thoughts about the argument in this piece but one is that citing a few studies to say that there is little evidence that "we discover what we think in the act of writing" contradicts everything I saw in 26 years of teaching college writing. Of course not the only we figure out what we think/1
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
A great new “duck/rabbit” example for intro to cog sci classes!
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
And: I actually teach in the messy, searching conversation & discusssion style he finds so laudable (that’s also the format for individual conferences with writers)…while also creating written materials that my students can revisit throughout the semester and beyond. We can (and should) do both!
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I obviously have a dog in this fight as someone who makes their living teaching writing to college students. I’m also someone who truly does figure out what I think through writing & rewriting. It’s not the ONLY way I think…but it is a way of thinking I could not exist as myself without.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Should writing be the ONLY required class? Probably not! (It kind of is, at my university, though we’re actually the “writing, speaking, and argument” program; I’d love to add a greater focus on critical reading.) But I do think writing belongs as *a* requirement for a well-rounded education.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Throughout the piece writing is framed as something we “force” on students for our own convenience/for the sake of bureaucracy. And it’s not like I don’t know there are students who hate their required writing classes…I teach them! (There are also students who hate speaking.)
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
…and those modalities have important affordances in relation to thinking and the assessment of it. But writing has its own affordances as an asynchronous mode of communication that speech does not. (This is a running thread throughout my cognition & writing class, which I’m teaching this semester.)
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I mean, it’s insulting as hell to those of us who teach writing (though I’ll admit to being unsurprised to learn that faculty in other disciplines think what we do is unimportant). But it’s also so utterly misguided. I’m a huge advocate for learning through dialogue, discussion, conversation…
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I’m also a college professor: a cognitive scientist who teaches writing. So you’ll say I only think this because I have a vested interest, but writing actually IS important, and this piece offers such a shallow and limited perspective on its value to us as thinkers. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think. (Gift Article)
If I do not treat writing as essential for achieving thought, it is not clear why I should force my students to.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
(The StoryMap was created by my beloved colleague's students a couple years back!)
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
For this reason, I decided to cancel the walking discussion I'd planned for the first half of my Thursday writing class; normally we walk while discussing Kimmerer's "Speaking of Nature", but I'm gonna have them do this walk on their own instead: storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/64e9...
storymaps.arcgis.com
YoUR Nature Walk
In collaboration with Ganondagan State Historic Site
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
One of many frustrating things about the stupid injuries I incurred in my startled-by-mouse fall last week is that my always slightly-draggy, nerve-damaged left leg is now paired with a right leg that has a badly bruised/gouged shin. So now neither leg is great at doing its job!!
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Hannah Vardit @hannahvardit.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
i worry that men think being A Good Guy is dramatically and heroically intervening on behalf of an endangered woman and then being publicly rewarded on a grand scale when actually being A Good Guy is just usually saying, “hey man that’s not funny” or “wow that’s fucked up” and there is no reward
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ve, the ghost of info past @vortexegg.com · 28/09/2026
The push to make it so that "websites as a destination for humans is over" is an intentional move to violate the freedom to read of individuals and move access to information into a "pay to get an opaquely intermediated version from a nontransparent source" model.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
new post on my #knitting blog: not much knitting! lots of thoughts on grappling with a "stupid" injury.
whitknits.wordpress.com
an open wound
Don't worry, I won't be sharing a photo of it...but I have indeed been walking around (as little as I can manage, but that's likely still more than I ought to be) with an open wound this week, in a very literal sense. Here's the story: on Tuesday morning, I was pedaling away on the exercise bike in our basement, finishing up Michael Pollan's "A World Appears" (which was fantastic!) on my Kobo while I exercised; I start every day with 30 minutes of exercise either on the bike or on the (old, 1990's era) Nordic Track that sits behind it.
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Reposted by Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they)
Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
From Serena Jampel, one of the writing tutors I worked with at Harvard on the difference between the human tutor and AI and how a writing tutor can help a student find their voice. Lots of wisdom and also this truth: "the more you use it, the more you use it" www.harvardmagazine.com/commentary/h...
And that was another remarkable feature of the Writing Center. Sometimes students would resist my feedback, insisting that their structure would make sense once they added a bit more reasoning. In doing so, they were often pushed to articulate their thinking more clearly, and to affirm their confidence in their position.

An LLM cannot do that, because it does not have its own opinions or thoughts. It is only trained to engage the user: the more you use it, the more you use it. That’s actually the antithesis of writing instruction, which aims to cultivate independent thought.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
new post on my #knitting blog: not much knitting! lots of thoughts on grappling with a "stupid" injury.
whitknits.wordpress.com
an open wound
Don't worry, I won't be sharing a photo of it...but I have indeed been walking around (as little as I can manage, but that's likely still more than I ought to be) with an open wound this week, in a very literal sense. Here's the story: on Tuesday morning, I was pedaling away on the exercise bike in our basement, finishing up Michael Pollan's "A World Appears" (which was fantastic!) on my Kobo while I exercised; I start every day with 30 minutes of exercise either on the bike or on the (old, 1990's era) Nordic Track that sits behind it.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
(I have so many reasons to be mad at Muse, but now I’ve got to add “feeling compelled to re-create a photo in crayon out of sheer spite”. Something I do feel very tempted to do now.)
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Oh, FB, I promise you that if I felt a pressing need to have a “crayon masterpiece” of this 14 year old photo of my and my daughter, I would dig out her old crayons and draw the thing my damned self. I made those sweaters with my own hands, I have no aversion to making things myself!
A screenshot of an ad for Muse, suggesting that it can take tasks off my plate. The task being proposed? Turning a photo of my holding my infant daughter while wearing matching handknit sweaters into a “crayon masterpiece”.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
(Of course, I “noped out” right into a cognitive science grad program with its own messed up culture around sexualizing female students & social pressure to attend events where inappropriate behavior could be expected, so that was fun.)
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Oooof, so glad I got out of the CS/AI space when I did (‘06-ish)…what drove me out was the way I was treated (by fellow students and by faculty) as if my only value was as a reward for the boys, not as an excellent programmer in my own right.
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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
‘We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.’ This is a CEO openly confessing to a level of acquired mental indolence that, were he not coddled 24/7 by an army of paid underlings, would make him incapable of living independently and feeding himself. He’s fine with it. Your kids won’t be.
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Robert "The Bobby Yaga" McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
“We asked an amoral billionaire who can’t remember his own address how the industry that prints his money — ravenous for energy and powered by environmentally antagonistic power sources on an unprecedented scale — could help with climate change.”
nytimes.com
Opinion | Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far
Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, does not want you to be afraid of A.I.
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John Warner @biblioracle.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I don’t mean this as a criticism of this piece, but this was obvious from the start. If you don’t know anything, AI is a substitute, not a tool. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | A.I. Has Made Me a Better Doctor. It’s Made Med Students Worse.
I’m confident in my mastery over what doctors do — and less confident about my continued mastery of an ever-evolving universe of facts.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Seriously, I hate the shift towards everything being a video SO MUCH. (There are some things where videos that accompany a manual would be helpful, but please just let me freaking READ!!!)
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
I like this notetaking example. it is a good case of how gender works. Notetaking has never been about producing a transcript. It is a bureaucratic skill in the 20th c. organixarion because it is SENSEMAKING. Those women socialized to take notes? They have been doing men’s metacognition for them
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Those interested in the lunchbox mouse saga can see this set of posts on my knitting blog: whitknits.wordpress.com/category/toy...
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I keep hearing little sounds and it's probably nothing at all but if another fucking mouse runs across my desk today, OMFG...please let there be no more rodents in spaces where I do not expect to see rodents! (Last year, one DID run across my desk + lunchbox, which inspired me to knit a mouse!)
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
My current suite of injuries has made it exceptionally clear to me how much I like to sit with my legs crossed or tucked under me somehow. Possibly this is partly because I'm short and my feet don't reach the floor easily in normal desk chairs? Anyway, it's VERY annoying not to be able to do so.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I've always preferred "confabulation" to "hallucination"; it's probably still too anthropomorphizing, but to me it better captures the fact that these models are literally always just making plausible shit up. (Just found this piece from '23: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...)
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Hallucination or Confabulation? Neuroanatomy as metaphor in Large Language Models
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