English Majors Can Teach Us How To Be Indispensable In The Age Of AI

Click through any thought leadership outlet, and you’ll see that CEOs and AI titans agree: English majors are the new best hire.

Anthropic President Daniela Amodei, who studied English Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told ABC News that with the advent of AI, she thinks “studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever.”

“A lot of these [AI] models are actually very good at STEM,” she said. “But I think this idea that there are things that make us uniquely human…will always be really, really important. And I think the ability to have critical thinking skills and learn how to interact with other people will be more important in the future, rather than less.”

Those power skills she references are the bread and butter of a literature degree. Critical thinking, empathy, and nuanced communication skills make you more adaptable and open-minded, and these abilities are super-charged by one practice that’s necessary for studying literature: close reading. This reading technique not only cultivates in humans the skills that AI hasn’t yet mastered; it is an essential technique for analyzing and validating AI-produced content.

While English majors spend years developing this skill, it’s something that anyone can begin practicing right away, and it will help you stand out in an AI-coded job market.

What is close reading?

Put simply, close reading is the practice of slowly and carefully reading a text, taking time to notice the language and consider the mechanics. Significant words, repetition, syntax, and style all become food for thought. This reading practice requires an open mind, time for reflection, and even re-reading in an effort to catch nuance and look for patterns.

English majors are trained to close read the work of great writers like Shakespeare and Faulkner and Morrison, but it is a practice that can be applied to other types of texts too—from news articles to web copy to nonfiction books by business leaders. The point of close reading is to move past a superficial understanding of events, characters, and themes to a deeper analysis of how a text is constructed and why. Doing so can reveal the author’s assumptions or bias, cultural influences, and subtle references.

Put differently, close reading requires sustained attention to a text combined with critical thinking about it. It is a discrete skill—one particular method of reading—but practicing it is also an avenue to deeper understanding and more sophisticated judgment in general. Think of it as expanding your capacity for pushing past the surface of a statement or a problem and accessing the well of meaning underneath it.

In today’s AI-affected labor market, according to economist and author Kyla Scanlon, it is jobs that are “threaded with judgement and accountability and creativity,” and the workers who have those skills, that are most durable. Close reading is both a specific AI literacy skill (more on that later) and a practice that builds and demonstrates some of the most valuable, essentially human qualities to employers.

Close reading offers a big payoff for slowing down.

Most reading is done in a hurry. Reading for pleasure often elicits reading fast—racing to the end of the plot to see what happens, or pushing to complete a chapter before your toddler wakes from a nap—and task-oriented reading involves glossing over content that at first glance seems unimportant or already polished. Strategies for speed reading, in order to consume large volumes of text quickly, are also popular among graduate students and even U.S. Presidents.

In contrast, close reading forces you to slow down, demanding patience and rewarding you for it. You have to focus on the task at hand. You might have to re-read a sentence or passage. You have to pause and think. You might have to look up a word or take notes in the margins. The goal isn’t to complete a task via reading the text; reading is the task itself.

Instead of scanning a white paper your colleague wrote with AI to make sure it “sounds good,” for example, you might take the time to close read it, thoughtfully considering the quality and construction of the information. Your ability to evaluate the quality and give specific and nuanced feedback if necessary will distinguish you at work.

Likewise, slowly reading the latest study in your field—allowing the natural regressions to occur that are essential for comprehension—means that you’ll also retain more of the information you consumed than a colleague who only skimmed it, and that you’ll have increased your capacity for doing so going forward, thanks to neuroplasticity.

Whether you choose business articles or the latest novel from your favorite author, close reading requires focus and helps you build cognitive endurance. The effort and time required counters the constant, quick consumption of sound bites and short-form content we have become accustomed to. According to Informatics expert Dr. Gloria Mark, our attention spans have shrunk as a result of constant attention switching, and our stress levels have grown. Dedicating time to reading can help restore your ability to focus your attention on one task at a time.

A willingness to sit with the information you encounter, to consider it thoughtfully and examine it from all sides, is a necessary step to both deep understanding and creative problem solving—both skills that make humans valuable in the AI landscape.

Close reading helps you analyze AI output for quality.

Every person, team, or organization relying heavily on AI content needs someone with the skills to perform quality assurance on the output. Close reading (even if it’s in your free time) helps you develop the ability to fill that role.

Although generative AI produces text that looks and sounds polished, it often includes confident errors called hallucinations, fabricates sources and references, and carries certain stylistic tells that it was not written by a human. Since AI-produced content is usually technically perfect, line editing and proofreading are now less useful skills, and skimming and scanning can cause you to miss the content’s gaps in reasoning. Close reading, on the other hand, helps you grasp the concepts being conveyed—or not conveyed, as is often the case in AI workslop.

Humans are accountable for the content they produce with AI, which means that a human reader needs to know what to look for in the quality assurance process. Practice with close reading will boost your critical thinking skills and make you more attuned to the nuances and texture of written content, both of which are necessary for turning AI workslop into something useful. For example, while AI itself is great at pattern recognition, it also chronically overuses words and phrases that humans do not; this is one of the reasons that AI content can feel plastic or uncanny to the reader. Close reading is the skill that enables you to go beyond feeling that a text is off to actually being able to explain why, and then do something about it.

Employers today need workers who can move beyond task-oriented reading (glossing over content as they skim and scan for only the relevant-to-them details) to something more nuanced and adaptive. To increase their durability in the job market, non-humanities-trained professionals should take a page out of the English major playbook and start honing their close reading skills.

To read more of my advice for using communication skills to build your career, hit the blue “Follow Author” button by my byline.