Category: Writing

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On the Gen Ed Revisions Proposal, or Why Composition Courses Matter

Here is another very EMU-centric and very long post, though not unlike the post I had in September about the EMU-AAUP 2027-29 contract, maybe there are those beyond EMU who might be interested in my efforts to explain my field and the course that is most associated with it, first year writing. Let me also make clear that I am speaking only for myself and not for my program or colleagues or whatever. So, with that disclaimer out of the way:

In August, Interim Provost David Schecter announced that General Education was going to be revised. The new requirements are going to be “launched” in the 2027-28 school year, and then fully implemented in 28-29. Every course in Gen Ed will apparently have to be re-evaluated to meet the new outcomes, though these outcomes have not yet been developed.  Schecter and the faculty committee he set up for this released an outline of what the new Gen Ed will (likely) look like for faculty to review before the upcoming campus-wide town hall discussions. This is a link to the PDF that was widely circulated via email.

The main goal seems to be to reduce the number of Gen Ed requirements from 41 credits to around 31 by cutting the number of courses in each category and eliminating the Learning Beyond the Classroom requirement. I don’t disagree with either of these goals, actually. Reducing the number of required courses would put EMU’s Gen Ed is in line with the Michigan Transfer Agreement, which is 30 credits. And while Learning Beyond the Classroom was (and probably still is) a good idea, the logistics of running that program have always been challenging.

What concerns me is the language about potential changes to the Effective Communication Gen Ed requirements. Currently, students fulfill this area with a writing course (aka “WRTG 121: Composition II: Researching the Public Experience”; aka “freshman comp;” aka “English Composition”) and a speech course (aka “COMM 124: Foundations of Speech Communication”). My area of expertise is composition and rhetoric, so I’m focusing here on that.

The Gen Ed proposal still requires two courses in this category, but it doesn’t seem to specify a particular course. Here is how this category is described on page 3 and 4:

Inquiry, Expression, and Critical Thinking (6 credit hours total) – students will take two required foundational classes in which they will develop their writing, communication, and critical thinking skills in preparation for subsequent college course work and their careers. In these foundational courses (e.g., first-year writing, argumentative writing, speech, visual communication), students will develop their abilities to evaluate and build arguments, to evaluate and incorporate information and evidence from appropriate and diverse sources, and to communicate effectively to an audience to achieve their purpose(s).

Confusingly, there is a table on page 7 of the Gen Ed proposal that still calls this area “Effective Communication,” and the notation on the table reads “This category may contain more than two courses moving forward; however, the total number of courses will remain small.”

I don’t know what this means. I am willing to take the provost and members of Gen Ed committee at their words when they say this proposal is a work in progress, no decisions have been made yet, and the committee and provost really want to hear what others have to say during the upcoming town hall events. But the rumors I have heard and the wording in this proposal suggest that there are faculty from other programs and departments on this committee who think that there ought to be other courses in this category as well. I can only speculate on the reasoning behind this, but my guess is the reasoning is that everyone writes and everyone assigns writing, so why should this requirement be restricted to a specific course or a specific discipline?

I strongly disagree, but before I get to that, let me briefly describe my discipline, composition and rhetoric, and my experiences in it.

Freshman Composition emerged as a course in the late 19th century, and today, somewhere around 90% of all colleges and universities in the U.S. require students to take a composition course. But composition and rhetoric (aka writing studies, composition studies, rhetoric and writing, etc.) is a relatively new academic specialization, with the first PhD programs emerging in the 1970s. Broadly speaking, composition and rhetoric also includes specialists in technical writing, business writing, and rhetoric. Some of the PhD programs around the country also include/are aligned with English as a Second Language or Communications. During my PhD studies in the 1990s (at BGSU and in an English department), I took courses about rhetorical theory, writing pedagogy, writing program administration, and qualitative research methodologies.

Most of my scholarship focuses on the connections between technology and writing pedagogy. My teaching includes everything from WRTG 121 to the courses graduate students need to take in order to teach WRTG 121 as a graduate assistant, not to mention many different 300 and 400-level classes. I have done quasi-administrative/service work over my 28 years at EMU as the coordinator of the undergrad program and MA program in writing, and as the interim director and associate director of the first-year writing program as well.  I also wrote and a textbook for teaching research writing, an online/open source textbook that is used by writing teachers all over the world.

In short, I think I know what I’m talking about.

My main objection to this (proposed, still hypothetical) move away from requiring WRTG 121 is that it assumes any course where writing is assigned can substitute. That is inaccurate because WRTG 121 is a composition course, one in which the subject of the course is the process of writing.

WRTG 121 is an introduction to writing with research in order to persuade an audience and argue a thesis. It’s called freshman composition because it is supposed to precede the more advanced writingiintensive course taken in a major. This is exactly the kind of course the Gen Ed proposal is calling for, and I would argue that it is a course that should be taken before students take a course in “argumentative writing,” “visual communication,” or any course in a subject area where writing is assigned. Unfortunately, a lot of students at EMU don’t take WRTG 121 until their junior or even senior year.

Students always need to have some topic to research and write about, and in 121, those topics vary quite a bit. But unlike a writing course in (for example) business or biology or philosophy, the subject of research is secondary to the focus on studying the process of writing.

Composition is a “how-to” type of course: how to get started with an idea by practicing invention strategies, how to develop a thesis, how to conduct research, and how to evaluate those sources.  The course introduces students to rhetoric in terms of studying appeals to persuade audiences, how to develop an argument, and how to arrange an essay. This is all accomplished through a series of scaffolded writing assignments: that is, rather than assigning students one large “research paper,” composition courses typically ask students to complete a series of shorter essays that build to a larger essay. Finally, composition courses are “student-centered” in that the pedagogy focuses on discussion, small group interactions, and peer review where students discuss each others’ essays with the goal of helping each other improve their final drafts.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

My second and closely related objection is that the Michigan Transfer Agreement specifically requires a composition course. Eliminating that requirement will likely create unanticipated transfer problems. Here’s a long quote from the MTA website:

To fulfill the Michigan Transfer Agreement, students must successfully complete at least 30 credits, with at least a 2.0 in each course and at least one credit completed at the institution awarding the MTA. These credits should be met according to the following distribution:

  • One course in English Composition

  • A second course in English Composition or 1 course in Communications

  • One course in Mathematics from one of three pathways: College Algebra, Statistics or Quantitative Reasoning

  • Two courses in Social Sciences (from two disciplines)

  • Two courses in Humanities and Fine Arts (from two disciplines excluding studio and performance classes)

  • Two courses in Natural Sciences including one with laboratory experience (from two disciplines)

Again, the MTA specifically requires an English Composition course, not merely a course where writing is assigned.  And based on my previous experience helping to administer the first-year writing program, that distinction between a composition course and a course that assigns writing matters.

One of the goals for revising the Gen Ed is to streamline the transfer process, in part by automating it. For the most part, this already happens with WRTG 121: when students transfer from the Michigan community colleges, public universities, and independent colleges and universities listed on the MTA website, the transfer is automated based on a specific composition course.  For example, Central Michigan’s ENG 103, Oakland’s WRT 1060, and U of M Dearborn’s COMP 106 all automatically transfer to EMU as 121– and vice versa.

But remember how I mentioned earlier that it was “almost” every university/college in the U.S.? It is “almost” because a lot of the most elite universities in the U.S. (the Ivy league and similarly prestigious places) don’t have a specific freshman composition course. One such university is the University of Michigan– though that is not because they don’t have composition courses. Rather, those courses are distributed across the curriculum at UM-Ann Arbor. It is also worth mentioning that both UM-Dearborn and UM-Flint have a specifically required composition courses, and those are institutions more similar to EMU than UM-Ann Arbor.

Sometimes, students will transfer to EMU from UM or another university where we don’t have a transfer agreement (from another state, for example), and that student will want EMU to count a particular course as the same as WRTG 121. When that happens, the director of first-year writing asks the student to share the syllabus for the course. If it looks like a composition course, it counts as 121. If it was a course that just assigned writing, it doesn’t.

Now, I suppose that if EMU moves away from a specific composition course, it doesn’t make a lot of difference to the students transferring from someplace else to here. After all, if we’re not going to have a specific composition course and we’re going to open it up to multiple courses, I’m sure we’ll still accept a real composition course as well. But besides the fact that eliminating a specifically required composition course would make us an outlier in terms of both the MTA and 90+% of other universities around the country like us, it would likely make it harder for EMU students to transfer someplace else.

So no, we should not eliminate a specific composition course from the General Education, and we should not open up that category to just any class where there happens to be writing assignments. That’s a bad idea.

This is more than long enough, but let me end with two more general observations:

First, none of this is to say that WRTG 121 is a perfect course and shouldn’t be changed in any way. There are lots of different ways the outcomes and design of the course could be changed and improved. For example, maybe there is an opportunity for making WRTG 121 and COMM 124 into a more closely coordinated two course sequence. But EMU also might want to require FTIACs to take freshman composition in their freshman year and before any writing intensive course within a major, and maybe we should require transfer students to take the course when they first enroll at EMU.

Second,  what is the motivation for this change in the proposal? Every other area of the current and proposed Gen ed presumes disciplinarity, and I don’t think that a writing course about the rhetoric of the sciences would be considered as a Gen Ed option for either the Social Sciences or Natural Sciences. What is different about my discipline?

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I’m a College Professor Too; I’ll Take Joe Cruz’s Bait

The New York Times published an opinion piece the other day by Joe Cruz, who is the chair of the philosophy department at Williams College, called “What if Writing Isn’t Central to Thinking?”  Cruz opens by noting that “most professors” believe that students learn to think “only by writing,” and now we are thrilled to see typos and errors in our students’ writing since it’s an indication that they didn’t just offload the assignment to AI. “But what if we are mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought?”

Cruz argues that writing is of course useful, “but the notion that it is the best process for developing thinking skills is a fairly recent idea, traceable to the 1970s writing-across-the-curriculum movement,” and that the research has been “inconclusive.” He shared a few links to a few cherry-picked/almost random articles to support this claim. Then he moves on to discuss Plato’s dialogue “Phaedrus,” in which Socrates criticized writing as offering the mere appearance of wisdom. Cruz, like Socrates, favors instead real-time interactions between people talking with each other to arrive at a version of “Truth”, aka dialectic and/or the Socratic method.

Okay, I’ll take that bait.

I’ll skip the studies/articles Cruz cites because I don’t think his readings of them are accurate. Teaching writing as a way of teaching students about thinking isn’t only traceable to the beginnings of WAC, and I believe that my field concluded a long time ago that writing (and reading) are activities that teach students how to think. But who ever said that writing is the only way to teach whatever it is Cruz means by “thinking?” In my experience, most professors believe that whatever discipline they are in is worth studying and teaching (and also writing about– I’ll come back to that) because it helps us learn to think.

Instead, I want to dwell on Cruz’s discussion of  “Phaedrus.”

When I was a PhD student studying rhetoric in the previous century, the two Platonic dialogues I read in a couple of different classes were “Phaedrus” and “Gorgias” because these two dialogues are where Plato/Socrates has the most to say about rhetoric and writing. Socrates was no fan of rhetoric, and he is most critical of the practice of it in “Gorgias.” That’s a dialog where Socrates talks with Gorgias, who was an actual contemporary of Socrates and one of the most well-known sophists/orators/rhetoricians of Ancient Greece. “Gorgias” is also the dialog where Socrates describes rhetoric as being like “cookery,” which, as an enthusiastic home cook, has always tickled me.

“Phaedrus” as a whole is an example of what Plato/Socrates thinks is wrong with rhetoric in general and with writing in particular. The dialog is unusual in that it only has two “characters”: Socrates, and the young man Phaedrus, who is not exactly the sharpest crayon in the box. They run into each other outside of the walls of Athens, and Phaedrus is excited to share with Socrates a speech written by someone else (Lysias) about the virtues of love between an old man and a young man. Phaedrus reads this scripted speech to Socrates, which is clearly “wrong” and untruthful because Phaedrus (the young man) is reading the part of the old man, but also because the speech is written down.

Socrates tongue-n-cheek praises the speech but then makes up another speech, this one also completely inappropriate because it is delivered by Socrates (the old man) but from the point of view of a young man (Phaedrus).  I’ve always thought there was an element of “Who is on first” with this exchange. Anyway, Socrates then launches into a long long LOOONNNGGG speech about the True (with a capital “T”) nature of love, which is actually about the nature of the soul, of philosophy, etc. After all that and probably about two-thirds of the way through the dialogue, Socrates and Phaedrus reflect on their different speeches. Then they discuss writing.

Socrates tells the story of how writing was an invention of the Egyptian god Theuth. He showed this invention to another god, Thamus, and Thamus has the same problems with writing as Socrates. Or vice versa. As Cruz points out, Socrates’ main complaint with writing is that the texts themselves “cannot speak, answer questions, or come to its own defense.” Socrates compares writing to paintings which “have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.”

When Socrates says writing cannot speak, I think we should interpret that literally. After all, ancient Greece was primarily an oral culture, and we don’t really know if Socrates was literate because he never wrote anything himself.  All we know about him is through other writers, notably Plato.  So when Socrates says that the problem with writing is that it cannot speak for itself, that is precisely what he means. In f2f classes, I will often demonstrate this by holding up the reading and saying, “What do you mean, Socrates?” and noting the lack of reply from the paper or the computer screen.

The other issue that complicates this is how often contemporary technologies make a lot of writing behave more like speech. Texting, electronic bulletin boards like Reddit, and the reviews/comments/threads on social media are all examples that immediately come to mind, but so are asynchronous online courses. I do a lot of discussions in my online courses, and as I tell students, these discussions are designed to take the place of the interactions/dialectic that we would have in a f2f class. Would Socrates think that these exchanges were what he meant by writing, or what he meant by speech?

Anyway, back to Cruz: like many academics who assign rather than teach writing, Cruz seems to think that one of the purposes of assigning his students papers is so he has something to grade. “Writing assignments serve practical needs of colleges and universities,” he writes. “When we receive a batch of 10-page essays, we can take them home, read a few, put them aside and grade the rest when the opportunity arises.” Of course, this is also one of the main strengths of literacy over orality: writing and reading enable separating content from a rhetor/speaker in a specific moment. Writing allows (requires) bureaucracy and it facilitates things like citation, both of which (Walter Ong argues in Orality and Literacy) enable governance and the ability to study. Written texts also last a lot longer than the writer. Socrates might have been adamantly against writing, but clearly Plato saw that it had some advantages; otherwise, we wouldn’t be talking about this dialogue at all, would we?

Cruz goes on to describe how he allowed students to consult AI to produce final essays, but then he spoke with his students in “real-time” with a 45 minute oral exam. As I understand it, Plato saw “dialectic” as an exchange between different speakers, a conversation. Certainly Socrates asserts his authority/talks more than anyone else in all of the dialogs, and most of what Phaedrus has to say in this particular dialogue is things like “I agree, Socrates– of course you are right!” But Socrates isn’t quizzing Phaedrus either.

Like most people in my field, I teach courses that  are small (25 or so) and discussion-based,  settings where students and teachers “think aloud together, vigorously and sharply.” We accomplish this by discussing things like books and articles and videos, but we also do so by talking to each other about writing as a process. We talk about how our ideas are developing, we have peer review activities to discuss rough drafts, and I usually have at least some opportunities for students to revise an essay after a grade. I’d argue this is much much more similar to what Socrates meant by dialectic than Cruz’s oral exam.

Honestly, I’m not sure Cruz completely agrees with the implied answers to his provocative questioning of the value of writing. In the reader comment section on the New York Times site, he responded to another comment that was an interesting example of how Winston Churchill overcame a stutter and became a great speaker by first becoming a great writer. Cruz wrote (in part) “Agreed, writing is no small thing, and maybe on the short list of profound ways we’ve increased our ability to handle complex abstraction. I was trying to suggest that there are other paths alongside writing, no doubt with knock-on effects, positive and negative, that deserve a reckoning.”

Of course! I have all kinds of problems with oral exams, but like Cruz, I don’t have a script when I teach, and I want to “engage my seminar students through messy, searching conversation, responding to their presence in the classroom to gauge whether we’re understanding one another.” Of course there are a lot of other ways to study and teach abstraction and thinking.

But isn’t it interesting that Cruz decided to write this down?

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Zero Books Read

Even before I started reading Rose Horowitch’s long essay in The Atlantic, the title, “The End of Reading is Here,” both aggravated me– because no, it’s not!— and also brought back a memory from my days as an MFA student in creative writing from 1988 to 90.

I earned that degree at Virginia Commonwealth University and my advisor was the writer Lee Smith. For reasons I don’t completely understand, Lee was on faculty at VCU for only a year, and I was lucky enough to work with her. She was fantastic, always generous with her time, encouraging but also pointed in her advice, so smart, etc. Great writer, great teacher, great person.

Anyway, there was some kind of event in either 1989 or 1990 where she was giving a speech about the state of writing and literature and what-not (I don’t remember if it was a panel discussion or a lecture or what, but I do remember it was a big crowd). One of the observations Lee made in that speech was that the average number of books read for pleasure by Americans that year was zero because most people do not read books for pleasure at all.

So whenever I read essays like this one proclaiming that now, now the end of reading has arrived, I always roll my eyes a bit. Horowitch romanticizes a  past where typical Americans were well read and famous writers were, well, famous (she mentions the appearance of famous American writers on the cover of Time or Life magazine back in the ’50s and ’60s). She laments the disappearance of newspapers and of difficult novels, and also the rise of interest in “young-adult fiction” even by those who are “decidedly not-young adults.”

I suppose literary culture was a bigger deal in America in the 1950s and ’60s and before, but as someone who has been teaching at “opportunity-granting” universities ever since I met Lee Smith, I assure you the supposed end of reading arrived many years ago. The idea that most people don’t read fiction or poetry for pleasure might be shocking to a group of English majors or columnists for The Atlantic. But when you teach general education classes like composition or introductory literature at a university where a significant percentage of the students are ill-prepared for college, and you ask these students about reading for pleasure, Lee’s zero books average seems about right. It’s been like this since I started teaching.

On average. I always have at least a few students in freshman comp who do read books, though they’re always most invested in genres like science fiction, romance, and fantasy, the kinds of “easy” and non-literary fiction that Horowitch characterizes as the “wrong kind” of books. But with maybe three to five  book readers in a class of 25 students, I suppose rounding down to a zero number of books read per year on average is about right. I haven’t taught a gen ed lit course in at least 20 years, but I certainly had students back then who had never read a complete novel before. A couple of years ago, I assigned the Johann Hari book Stolen Focus in freshman comp. It’s an accessible, best-selling non-fiction book about the decline in attention, and for several students, it was the first book they had ever read. English majors are, of course, more likely to be readers, but most of them seem less interested in books specifically and more in “media.” I’ll come back to that.

Not that Horowitch is completely wrong, and her essay is quite a bit more subtle than the headline. She spends a lot of time discussing Marshall McLuhan’s and Walter Ong’s theories of a postliterate era in smart and well-researched ways. I teach a class called “Digital Writing” where I assign some short Ong and McLuhan readings, so the next time I teach that class, I’m probably going to assign this. Her views on AI here are a bit more resistant than mine, but not that different, really. And as she points out, the sales of books in this country have been actually rising in recent years, partially as a result of resistance to AI.

But the problem, as Horowitch sees it, is that there is a smaller percentage of the overall population who read books (particularly novels) for pleasure– about the same percentage of students I have in freshman comp who are readers. Unlike in the past (she says), “the people devoted to text, who derive cultural understanding and intellectual connection from the written word, are now part of a subculture. The fact that you are reading this article almost certainly makes you a member of it.”

Horowitch goes on in this vein for quite a while (her essay is around 5,500 words): it’s bad that we’re not reading books, IQ and test scores are falling, this lack of reading books is what’s behind lots of problems, etc. etc. Again, she’s not wrong, but it does sound a lot like the similar complaints I’ve heard my entire adult life. Horowitch clearly understands this as well when she writes “Perhaps, 126 years from now, this essay will seem like the lastest such exercise in hand-wringing.”

So I think Horowitch is wrong about the existence of a “golden past” in America where reading books was more than a subculture. But beyond that, I don’t think reading books (and by books, she means “literature”)  is inherently better than reading almost anything else–other than social media posts. Horowitch and I probably agree that most X and TikTok -type content does not count as the kinds of longer form texts that everyone needs to master and regularly practice to be “literate.” But I think literary experiences can happen sometimes on social media (like on Substack, like on Reddit, sometimes on Facebook), and I think reading 5K-plus-word articles in The Atlantic or long articles in similar publications about sports or fashion or cooking is just as valuable for developing literacy as reading the “great works.”

The other issue for me is that Horowitch’s measure of a literate society is one that reads books for pleasure. Well, what about the majority of white-collar workers (and not a small share of blue-collar workers as well) who are reading and writing as part of their jobs all day long? Why doesn’t that count? I mean, during the school year and when I’m neck-deep in reading and commenting on my students’ writing and also keeping up with the readings I assigned, I do not read much for fun. Instead, my idea of pleasure after a workday of reading and writing is to watch television (including streaming) or a movie, or to play around on my computer.

And speaking of the postliterate media that are not books: what’s wrong with that!? As I mentioned, the students I have in more advanced classes who are English majors or MA students tend to read for pleasure– or at least they are reading more than zero books per year on their own. But they are also very into media well beyond the book, and with good reason: a lot of it is really good nowadays. In my view, the best movies and streaming media today are every bit as “literary” as texts that happen to be printed on paper. And our postliterate world (which I think we entered long ago) has not resulted in the “end of reading” at all. It is not either/or; it is and/and.

I had mostly made my mind up about Horowitch before I finished the essay: here’s another Boomer or early GenXer who is mad about the kids today. Then, in the last six paragraphs, things took an interesting turn. Horowitch writes “I was raised in the postliterate era. I was born shortly after the dot-com bubble burst and entered first grade around the time the iPhone was released.” After reading that line, I did a simple search, and her LinkedIn account popped up. It appears that Horowitch is a precocious young person with an old soul.

This doesn’t change my reading of Horowitch’s essay– it’s well-written and interesting, but I still think she’s mostly wrong about literacy. But I have to say there’s something refreshing and charming about one of the “kids today” making such a passionate argument in favor of old books.

 

 

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My Peter Elbow Story

Peter Elbow died earlier this month at the age of 89. The New York Times had an obituary February 27 (a gift article) that did a reasonably good job of capturing his importance in the field of composition and rhetoric. I would not agree with the Times about how Elbow’s signature innovation, “free writing,” is a “touchy-feely” technique, but other than that, I think they get it about right. I can think of plenty of other key scholars and forces in the field, but I can’t think of anyone more important than Elbow.

Elbow was an active scholar and regular presence at the Conference for College Composition and Communication well into the 2000s. I remember seeing him in the halls going from event to event, and I saw him speak several times, including a huge event where he and Wayne Booth presented and then discussed their talks with each other.

A lot of people in the field had one store or another about meeting Peter Elbow; here’s my story (which I shared on Facebook earlier this month when I first learned of his passing):

When I was a junior in high school, in 1982-83 and in Cedar Falls, Iowa, I participated in some kind of state-wide or county-wide writing writing event/contest. This was a long time ago and I don’t remember any of the details about how it worked or what I wrote to participate in it, but I’m pretty sure it was an essay event/contest of some sort– as opposed to a fiction/poetry contest. It was held on the campus of the University of Northern Iowa, which is in Cedar Falls. So because it was local, a bunch of people from my high school and other local schools and beyond show up. My recollection was students participated in a version of a peer review sort of workshop.

This event was also a contest of some sort and there was a banquet everyone went to and where there were “winners” of some sort. I definitely remember I was not one of them. The banquet was a buffet, and I remember going through the line and there was this old guy (well, he would have been not quite 50 at this point) who was perfectly polite and nice and with a wondering eye getting something out of a chaffing dish right next to me. I don’t remember the details, but I think he was asked me about what I thought of this whole peer review thing we did, and I’m sure I told him it was fun because it was.

So then it turns out that this guy was there to give some kind of speech to all of the kids and all of the teachers and other adults that were at this thing. Well, really this was a speech for the teachers and adults and the kids were just there. I don’t remember how many were there, but I’m guessing maybe 100-200 people. I don’t remember anything Elbow talked about and I didn’t think a lot about it afterwards. But then a few years later and when I was first introduced to Elbow’s work in the comp/rhet theory class I took in my MFA program, I somehow figured out that I met that guy once years before and didn’t realize it at the time.

I can’t say I’ve read a ton of his writing, but what I have read I have found both smart and inspirational. It’s hard for me to think of anyone else who has had as much of an influence on shaping the field and the kind of work I do. May his memory be a blessing to his friends and family.

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Six Things I Learned After a Semester of Lots of AI

Two years ago (plus about a week!), I wrote about how “AI Can Save Writing by Killing ‘The College Essay,'” meaning that if AI can be used to respond to bad writing assignments, maybe teachers will focus more on teaching writing as a process the way that scholars in writing studies have been talking about for over 50 years. That means an emphasis on “showing your work” through a series of scaffolded assignments, peer review activities, opportunities for revision, and so forth.

This past semester, I decided to really lean into AI in my classes. I taught two sections of first-year writing where the general research topic for everyone was “your career goals and AI,” and where I allowed (even encouraged) the use of AI under specific circumstances. I also taught an advanced class for majors called “Digital Writing” where the last two assignments were all about trying to use AI to “create” or “compose” “texts” (the scare quotes are intentional there). I’ve been blogging/substacking about this quite a bit since summer and there are more details I’m not getting to here because it’s likely to be part of a scholarly project in the near future.

But since the fall semester is done and I have popped the (metaphorical) celebratory bottle of bubbly, I thought I’d write a little bit about some of the big-picture lessons about teaching writing with (and against) AI I learned this semester.

Teachers can “refuse” or “resist” or “deny” AI all they want, but they should not ignore it.

As far as I can tell from talking with my students, most of my colleagues did not address AI in their classes at all. A few students reported that they did discuss and use AI in some of their other classes. I had several students in first-year writing who were interior design majors and all taking a course where the instructor introduced them to AI design tools– sounded like an interesting class. I had a couple of students tell me an instructor “forbid” the use of AI but with no explanation of what that meant. Most students told me the teacher never brought up the topic of AI at all.

Look, you can love AI and think it is going to completely transform learning and education, you can hate AI all you want and wish it had never been invented and do all you can to break that AI machine with your Great Enoch sledgehammers. But ignoring it or wishing it away is ridiculous.

For my first-year writing students, most of whom readily admitted they used AI a lot in high school to do things that were probably cheating, I spent some time explaining how they could and could not use AI. I did so in part to teach about how I think AI can be a useful tool as part of the process of writing, but I also did this to establish my credibility. I think a lot of students end up cheating with AI because they think that the teacher is clueless about it– and I think a lot of times, students are right.

You’re gonna need some specific rules and guidelines about AI– especially if you want to “refuse” or “resist” it.

I have always included on my syllabi an explicit policy about plagiarism, and this year I added language that makes it clear that copying and pasting large chunks of text from AI is cheating. I did allow and encourage first-year writing students to use AI as part of their process, and I required my advanced writing students to use AI as part of their “experiments” in that class. But I also asked students to include an “AI Use Statement” with their final drafts, one that explained what AI systems they used (and that included Grammarly), what prompts they used, how they used the AI feedback in their essay, and so forth. Because this was completely new to them (and me too), these AI Use Statements were sometimes a lot less complete and accurate than I would have preferred.

I also insisted that students write with Google Docs for each writing assignment and for all steps in the process, from the very start of the first hint of a first draft until they hand it into me. Students need to share this with me so I can edit it. I take a look at the “version history” of the Google Doc, and if I suddenly see pages of clear prose magically appear in the essay, we have a discussion. That seemed to work well.

Still, sometimes students are still going to cheat with AI, and often without realizing that they’re cheating.

Even with the series of scaffolded assignments and using Google Docs and all of my warnings, I did catch a few students cheating with AI in both intentional and not as intentional ways. Two of these examples were similar to old-school plagiarism. One was from a student from another country who had some cultural and language disconnections about the expectations of American higher education (to put it mildly); I think first-year writing was too advanced and this student should have been advised into an ESL class. Another was a student who was late on a short assignment and handed in an obviously AI-generated text (thanx, Google Docs!). I gave this person a stern warning and another chance, and they definitely didn’t do that again.

As I wrote about in this post about a month ago, I also had a bunch of students who followed the AI more closely than the first assignment, the Topic Proposal. This is a short essay where students write about how they came up with their topic and initial thesis for their research for the semester. Instead, a lot of students asked AI what it “thought” of their topic and thesis, and then they more or less summarized the AI responses, which were inevitably about why the thesis was correct. Imagine a mini research paper but without any research.

The problem was that wasn’t the assignment.  Rather, the assignment asked students to describe how they came up with their thesis idea: why they were interested in the topic in the first place, what kinds of other topics they considered, what sorts of brainstorming techniques they used, what their peers told them, and so forth. In other words, students tried to use the AI to tell them what they thought, and that just didn’t work. It ended up being a good teachable moment.

A lot of my students do not like AI and don’t use it that much. 

This was especially true in my more advanced writing class– where, as far as I can tell, no one used AI to blatantly cheat. For two of the three major projects of the semester, I required students to experiment with AI and then to write essays where they reflected/debriefed on their experiments while making connections to the assigned readings. Most of these students, all of whom were some flavor of an English major or writing minor, did not use AI for the reflection essays. They either felt that AI was just “wrong” in so many different ways (unethical, gross, unfair, bad for the environment, etc.), or they didn’t think the AI advice on their writing (other than some Grammarly) was all that useful for them.

This was not surprising; after all, students who major or minor in something English-related usually take pride in their writing and they don’t want to turn that over to AI. In the freshman composition classes, I had a few students who never used AI either–judging from what they told me in their AI Use statements. But a lot of students’ approaches to AI evolved as the semester went on, and by the time they were working on the larger research-driven essay where all the parts from the previous assignments come together, they said things like they asked ChatGPT for advice on “x” part of the essay, but it wasn’t useful advice so they ignored it.

But some students used AI in smart and completely undetectable ways.

This was especially true in the first year writing class. Some of the stronger writers articulated in some detail in their AI Use Statements how they used ChatGPT (and other platforms) to brainstorm, to suggest outlines for assignments, to go beyond Grammarly proofreading, to get more critical feedback on their drafts, and so forth. I did not consider this cheating at all because they weren’t getting AI to do the work for them; rather, they were getting some ideas and feedback on their work.

And here’s the thing that’s important: when a student (or anyone else) uses AI effectively and for what it’s really for, there is absolutely no way for the teacher (or any other reader) to possibly know.

The more time I have spent studying and teaching about AI, the more skeptical I have become about it. 

I think my students feel the same way, and this was especially true with the students in my advanced class who were directly studying and experimenting with many different AI platforms and tasks. The last assignment for the course asked students to use AI to do or make something that they could not have possibly done by themselves. For example, one student taught themself to play chess and was fairly successful with that– at least up to a point. Another student tried to get ChatGPT to teach them how to play the card game Euchre, though less successfully because the AI kept “cheating.” Another student asked the AI to code a website, and the AI was pretty good at that. Several students tried to use AI tools to compose music; similar to me I guess, they listen to lots of music and wished they could play an instrument and/or compose songs.

What was interesting to me and I think most of my students was how quickly they typically ran into the AI’s and their own limitations. Sometimes students wanted the AI to do something the AI simply could not do; for example, the problem with playing Euchre with the AI (according to the student) is it didn’t keep track of what cards had already been played– thus the cheating. But the bigger problem was that without any knowledge of how to accomplish the task on their own, the AI was of little use. For example, the student who used AI to code a website still had no idea at all what any of the code meant, nor did they know what to do with it to make it into a real website. Students who knew nothing about music who tried to write/create songs couldn’t get very far. In other words, it was not that difficult for students to discover ways AI fails at a task, which in many ways is far more interesting than discovering what it can accomplish.

I’m also increasingly skeptical of the hype and role of AI in education, mainly because I spent most of the 2010s studying MOOCs. Remember them? They were going to be the delivery method for general education offerings everywhere, and by 2030 or 2040 or so, MOOCs were going to completely replace all but the most prestigious universities all over the world. Well, that obviously didn’t happen. But that didn’t mean the end of MOOCs; in fact, there are more people taking MOOC “courses” now than there were during the height of the MOOC “panic” around 2014. It’s just that nowadays, MOOCs are mostly for training (particularly in STEM fields), certificates, and as “edutainment” along the lines of Master Class.

I think AI is different in all kinds of ways, not the least of which is AI is likely to be significantly more useful than a chat box or to check grammar. I had several first-year students this semester write about AI and their future careers in engineering, logistics, and finance, and they all had interesting evidence about both how AI is being used right now and how it will likely be used in the future. The potential of AI changing the world at least as much as another recent General Purpose Technology, “the internet,” is certainly there.

Does that mean AI is going to have as great of an impact on education as the internet did? Probably, and teachers have had to make all kinds of big and small changes to how they teach things because of the internet, which was also true when writing classes first took up computers and word processing software.  But I think the fundamentals of teaching (rather than merely assigning) writing still work.

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Is Apple Intelligence (and AI) For Dumb and Lazy People?

And the challenges of an AI world where everyone is above average

I’ve been an Apple fanboy since the early 1980s. I owned one Windoze computer years ago that was mostly for games my kid wanted to play. Otherwise, I’ve been all Apple for around 40 years. But what the heck is the deal with these ads for Apple Intelligence?

In this ad (the most annoying of the group, IMO), we see a schlub of a guy, Warren, emailing his boss in idiotic/bro-based prose. He pushes the Apple Intelligence feature and boom, his email is transformed into appropriate office prose. The boss reads the prose, is obviously impressed, and the tagline at the end is “write smarter.” Ugh.

Then there’s this one:

This guy, Lance, is in a board meeting and he’s selected to present about “the Prospectus,” which he obviously has not read. He slowly wheels his office chair and his laptop into the hallway, asks Apple’s AI to summarize the key points in this long thing he didn’t read. Then he slowly wheels back into the conference room and delivers a successful presentation. The tagline on this one? “Catch up quick.” Ugh again.

But in a way, these ads might not be too far from wrong. These probably are the kind of “less than average” office workers who could benefit the most from AI— well, up to a point, in theory.

Among many other things, my advanced writing students and I read Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence, and in several different places in that book, he argues that in experiments when knowledge workers (consultants, people completing a writing task, programmers) use AI to complete tasks, they are much more productive. Further, while AI does not make already excellent workers that much better, it does help less than excellent workers improve. There’s S. Noy and W. Zhang’s Science paper “Experimental evidence on the productivity effects of generative artificial intelligence;” here’s a quote from the editor’s summary:

Will generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT disrupt the labor market by making educated professionals obsolete, or will these tools complement their skills and enhance productivity? Noy and Zhang examined this issue in an experiment that recruited college-educated professionals to complete incentivized writing tasks. Participants assigned to use ChatGPT were more productive, efficient, and enjoyed the tasks more. Participants with weaker skills benefited the most from ChatGPT, which carries policy implications for efforts to reduce productivity inequality through AI.

Then there’s S. Peng et al and their paper “The Impact of AI on Developer Productivity: Evidence from GitHub Copilot.” This was an experiment with a programming AI on Github, and the programmers who used AI completed tasks 55.8% faster. And Mollick talks a fair amount about a project he was a co-writer on, “Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality,” which found that consultants in an experiment were more productive when allowed to use AI— except when faced with a “jagged technology frontier” problem, which in the study was a technical problem beyond the AI’s abilities. However, one of the problems Mollick and his colleagues observed is that a lot of the subjects in their study often copied and pasted content from the AI with minimal editing, and the AI-using subjects had a much harder time with that jagged frontier problem. I’ll come back to this in a couple more paragraphs.

Now, Mollick is looking at AI as a business professor, so he sees this as a good thing because it improves the quality of the workforce, and maybe it’ll enable employers to hire fewer people to complete the same tasks. More productivity with less labor equals more money, capitalism for the win. But my English major students and I all see ourselves (accurately or not) as well-above-average writers, and we all take pride in that. We like the fact we’re better at writing than most other people. Many of my students are aspiring novelists, poets, English teachers, or some other career where they make money from their abilities to write and read, and they all know that publishing writing that other people read is not something that everyone can do. So the last thing any of us who are good at something want is a technology that diminishes the value of that expertise.

This is part of what is behind various declarations of late for refusing or resisting AI, of course. Part of what is motivating someone like Ted Chiang to write about how AI can’t make art is making art is what he is good at. The last thing he wants is a world where any schmuck (like those dudes in the Apple AI ads) can click a button and be as good as he is at making art. I completely understand this reason for fearing and resisting AI, and I too hope that AI doesn’t someday in the future become humanity’s default story teller.

Fortunately for writers like Chiang and me and my students, the AI hype does not square with reality. I haven’t played around with Apple AI yet, but the reviews I’ve seen are underwhelming. I stumbled across a YouTube review by Marques Brownlee about the new AI that is quite thorough. I don’t know much about Brownlee, but he has over 19 million subscribers so he probably knows what he is talking about. If you’re curious, he talks about the writing feature in the first few minutes of this video, but the short version is he says that as a professional writer, he finds it useless.

The other issue I think my students and I are noticing is that the jagged frontier Mollick and his colleagues talk about— that is, the line/divide between tasks the AI can accomplish reasonably well and what it can’t— is actually quite large. In describing the study Mollick and his colleagues did which included a specifically difficult/can’t do with AI jagged frontier problem, I think he implies that this frontier is small. But Mollick and his colleagues— and the same is true with these other studies he quotes on this— are not studying AI in real settings. These are controlled experiments, and the researchers are trying to do all they can to eliminate other variables.

But in the more real world with lots of variables, there are jagged frontiers everywhere. The last assignment I gave in the advanced writing class asked students to attempt to “compose” or “make” something with the help of AI (a poem, a play, a song, a movie, a website, etc. etc.) that they could not do on their own. The reflection essays are not due until the last week of class, but we have had some “show and tell” exchanges about these projects. Some students were reasonably successful with making or doing something thanks to AI— and as a slight tangent: some students are better than others at prompting the AI and making it work for them. It’s not just a matter of clicking a button. But they all ran into that frontier, and for a lot of students, that was essentially how their experiment ended. For example, one student was successful at getting AI to generate the code for a website; but this student didn’t know what to do with the code the AI made to make it actually into a website. A couple of students tried to use AI to write music, but since they didn’t know much about music, their results were limited. One student tried to get AI to teach them how to play the card game Euchre, but the AI kept on doing things like playing cards in the student’s hand.

This brings me back to these Apple ads: I wish they both went on just another minute or so. Right after Warren and Lance confidently look directly at the camera with smug look that says to viewers “Do you see what I just got away with there,” they have to follow through with what they supposedly have accomplished, and I have a feeling that would go poorly. Right after Warren’s boss talks with him about that email and right after Lance starts his summary, I am pretty sure they’re gonna get busted. Sort of like what has happened when I have suspected correctly that a student used too much AI and that student can’t answer basic questions about what it is they (supposedly) wrote.

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Why Teaching Citation Practices (yes, I’m talking MLA/APA style) is Even More Important with AI

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about why I use Google docs to teach writing at all levels. I’ve been using it for years–long before AI was a thing–in part because being able to see the history of a student’s Google doc is a teachable moment on the importance of the writing and revision process. This also has the added bonus of making it obvious if a student is skipping that work (by using AI, by copying/pasting from the internet, by stealing a paper from someone else, etc.) because the document history goes from nothing to a complete document in one step. I’m not saying that automatically means the student cheated, but it does prompt me to have a chat with that student.

In a similar vein and while I’m thinking about putting together my classes for the fall term, I thought I’d write about why I think teaching citation practices is increasingly important in research writing courses, particularly first year composition.

TL;DR version: None of this is new or innovative; rather, this is standard “teaching writing as a process” pedagogy and I’ve been teaching research writing like this for decades. But I do think it is even more important to teach citation skills now to help my students distinguish between the different types of sources, almost all of which are digital rather than on paper. Plus this is an assignment where AI might help, but I don’t think it’d help much.

Continue reading “Why Teaching Citation Practices (yes, I’m talking MLA/APA style) is Even More Important with AI”

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Why I Use Google Docs to Teach Writing, Especially in the Age of AI

I follow a couple different Facebook groups about AI, each of which have become a firehose of posts lately, a mix of cool new things and brand new freakouts. A while back, someone in one of these groups posted about an app to track the writing process in a student’s document as a way of proving that the text was not AI. My response to this was “why not just use Google docs?”

I wish I could be more specific than this, but I can’t find the original post or my comment to it; maybe it was deleted. Anyway, this person asked “what did I mean?” and I explained it briefly, but then I said I was thinking about writing a blog post about it. Here is that post.

For those interested in the tl;dr version: I think the best way to discourage students from handing in work they didn’t create (be that from a papermill, something copied and pasted from websites, or AI) is to teach writing rather than merely assigning writing. That’s not “my” idea; that’s been the mantra in writing studies for at least 50 years. Also not a new idea and one you already know if you use and/or teach with Google docs: it is a great tool for teaching writing because it helps with peer review and collaborative writing, and the version history feature helps me see a student’s writing process, from the beginning of the draft through revisions. And if a student’s draft goes from nothing to complete in one revision, well, then that student and I have a chat.

Continue reading “Why I Use Google Docs to Teach Writing, Especially in the Age of AI”

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The Problem is Not the AI

The other day, I heard the opening of this episode of the NPR call-in show 1A, “Know It All: ChatGPT In the Classroom.” It opened with this recorded comment from a listener named Kate:

“I teach freshman English at a local university, and three of my students turned in chatbot papers written this past week. I spent my entire weekend trying to confirm they were chatbot written, then trying to figure out how to confront them, to turn them in as plagiarist, because that is what they are, and how I’m going penalize their grade. This is not pleasant, and this is not a good temptation. These young men’s academic careers now hang in the balance because now they’ve been caught cheating.”

Now, I didn’t listen to the show for long beyond this opener (I was driving around running errands), and based on what’s available on the website, the discussion  also included information about incorporating ChatGPT into teaching. Also, I don’t want to be too hard on poor Kate; she’s obviously really flustered and I am guessing there were a lot of teachers listening to Kate’s story who could very personally relate.

But look, the problem is not the AI.

Perhaps Kate was teaching a literature class and not a composition and rhetoric class, but let’s assume whatever “freshman English” class she was teaching involved a lot of writing assignments. As I mentioned in the last post I had about AI and teaching with GPT-3 back in December, there is a difference between teaching writing and assigning writing. This is especially important in classes where the goal is to help students become better at the kind of writing skills they’ll need in other classes and “in life” in general.

Teaching writing means a series of assignments that build on each other, that involve brainstorming and prewriting activities, and that involve activities like peer reviews, discussions of revision, reflection from students on the process, and so forth. I require students in my first year comp/rhet classes to “show their work” through drafts that is in a way they similar to how they’d be expected to in an Algebra or Calculus course. It’s not just the final answer that counts. In contrast, assigning writing is when teachers give an assignment (often a quite formulaic one, like write a 5 paragraph essay about ‘x’) with no opportunities to talk about getting started, no consideration of audience or purpose, no interaction with the other students who are trying to do the same assignment, and no opportunity to revise or reflect.

While obviously more time-consuming and labor-intensive, teaching writing has two enormous advantages over only assigning writing. First, we know it “works” in that this approach improves student writing– or at least we know it works better than only assigning writing and hoping for the best. We know this because people in my field have been studying this for decades, despite the fact that there are still a lot of people just assigning writing, like Kate. Second, teaching writing makes it extremely difficult to cheat in the way Kate’s students have cheated– or maybe cheated. When I talk to my students about cheating and plagiarism, I always ask “why do you think I don’t worry much about you doing that in this class?” Their answer typically is “because we have to turn in all this other stuff too” and “because it would be too much work,” though I also like to believe that because of the way the assignments are structured, students become interested in their own writing in a way that makes cheating seem silly.

Let me just note that what I’m describing has been the conventional wisdom among specialists in composition and rhetoric for at least the last 30 (and probably more like 50) years. None of this is even remotely controversial in the field, nor is any of this “new.”

But back to Kate: certain that these three students turned in “chatbot papers,” she spent the “entire weekend” working to prove these students committed the crime of plagiarism and they deserve to be punished. She thinks this is a remarkably serious offense– their “academic careers now hang in the balance”– but I don’t think she’s going through all this because of some sort of abstract and academic ideal. No, this is personal. In her mind, these students did this to her and she’s going to punish them. This is beyond a sense of justice. She’s doing this to get even.

I get that feeling, that sense that her students betrayed her. But there’s no point in making teaching about “getting even” or “winning” because as the teacher, you create the game and the rules, you are the best player and the referee, and you always win. Getting even with students is like getting even with a toddler.

Anyway, let’s just assume for a moment that Kate’s suspicions are correct and these three students handed in essays created entirely by ChatGPT. First off, anyone who teaches classes like “Freshman English” should not need an entire weekend or any special software to figure out if these essays were written by an AI. Human writers– at all levels, but especially comparatively inexperienced human writers– do not compose the kind of uniform, grammatically correct, and robotically plodding prose generated by ChatGPT. Every time I see an article with a passage of text that asks “was this written by a robot or a student,” I always guess right– well, almost always I guess right.

Second,  if Kate did spend her weekend trying to find “the original” source ChatGPT used to create these essays, she certainly came up empty handed. That was the old school way of catching plagiarism cheats: you look for the original source the student plagiarized and confront the student with it, court room drama style. But ChatGPT (and other AI tools) do not “copy” from other sources; rather, the AI creates original text every time. That’s why there have been several different articles crediting an AI as a “co-author.”

Instead of wasting a weekend, what Kate should have done is called each of these students into her office or taken them aside one by one in a conference and asked them about their essays. If the students cheated,  they would not be able to answer basic questions about what they handed in, and 99 times out of 100, the confronted cheating student will confess.

Because here’s the thing: despite all the alarm out there that all students are cheating constantly, my experience has been the vast majority do not cheat like this, and they don’t want to cheat like this. Oh sure, students will sometimes “cut corners” by looking over to someone else’s answers on an exam, or maybe by adding a paragraph or two from something without citing it. But in my experience, the kind of over-the-top sort of cheating Kate is worried about is extremely rare. Most students want to do the right thing by doing the work, trying to learn something, and by trying their best– plus students don’t want to get in trouble from cheating either.

Further, the kinds of students who do try to blatantly plagiarize are not “criminal masterminds.” Far from it. Rather, students blatantly plagiarize when they are failing and desperate, and they are certainly not thinking of their “academic careers.” (And as a tangent: seems to me Kate might be overestimating the importance of her “Freshman English” class a smidge).

But here’s the other issue: what if Kate actually talked to these students, and what if it turned out they either did not realize using ChatGPT was cheating, and/or they used ChatGPT in a way that wasn’t significantly different from getting some help from the writing center or a friend? What do you do then? Because– and again, I wrote about this in December— when I asked students to use GPT-3 (OpenAI’s software before ChatGPT) to write an essay and to then reflect on that process, a lot of them described the software as being a brainstorming tool, sort of like a “coach,” and not a lot different from getting help from others in peer review or from a visit to the writing center.

So like I said, I don’t want to be too hard on Kate. I know that there are a lot of teachers who are similarly freaked out about students using AI to cheat, and I’m not trying to suggest that there is nothing to worry about either. I think a lot of what is being predicted as the “next big thing” with AI is either a lot further off in the future than we might think, or it is in the same category as other famous “just around the corner” technologies like flying cars. But no question that this technology is going to continue to improve, and there’s also no question that it’s not going away. So for the Kates out there: instead of spending your weekend on the impossible task of proving that those students cheated, why not spend a little of that time playing around with ChatGPT and seeing what you find out?

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AI Can Save Writing by Killing “The College Essay”

I finished reading and grading the last big project from my “Digital Writing” class this semester, an assignment that was about the emergence of openai.com’s artificial intelligence technologies GPT-3 and DALL-E. It was interesting and I’ll probably write more about it later, but the short version for now is my students and I have spent the last month or so noodling around with software and reading about both the potentials and dangers of rapidly improving AI, especially when it comes to writing.

So the timing of of Stephen Marche’s recently published commentary with the clickbaity title “The College Essay Is Dead” in The Atlantic could not be better– or worse? It’s not the first article I’ve read this semester along these lines, that GPT-3 is going to make cheating on college writing so easy that there simply will not be any point in assigning it anymore. Heck, it’s not even the only one in The Atlantic this week! Daniel Herman’s “The End of High-School English” takes a similar tact. In both cases, they claim, GPT-3 will make the “essay assignment” irrelevant.

That’s nonsense, though it might not be nonsense in the not so distant future. Eventually, whatever comes after GPT-3 and ChatGPT might really mean teachers can’t get away with only assigning writing. But I think we’ve got a ways to go before that happens.

Both Marche and Herman (and just about every other mainstream media article I’ve read about AI) make it sound like GPT-3, DALL-E, and similar AIs are as easy as working the computer on the Starship Enterprise: ask the software for an essay about some topic (Marche’s essay begins with a paragraph about “learning styles” written by GPT-3), and boom! you’ve got a finished and complete essay, just like asking the replicator for Earl Grey tea (hot). That’s just not true.

In my brief and amateurish experience, using GPT-3 and DALL-E is all about entering a carefully worded prompt. Figuring out how to come up with a good prompt involved trial and error, and I thought it took a surprising amount of time. In that sense, I found the process of experimenting with prompts similar to the kind of  invention/pre-writing activities  I teach to my students and that I use in my own writing practices all the time.  None of my prompts produced more than about two paragraphs of useful text at a time, and that was the case for my students as well. Instead, what my students and I both ended up doing was entering in several different prompts based on the output we were hoping to generate. And my students and I still had to edit the different pieces together, write transitions between AI generated chunks of texts, and so forth.

In their essays, some students reflected on the usefulness of GPT-3 as a brainstorming tool.  These students saw the AI as a sort of “collaborator” or “coach,” and some wrote about how GPT-3 made suggestions they hadn’t thought of themselves. In that sense, GPT-3 stood in for the feedback students might get from peer review, a visit to the writing center, or just talking with others about ideas. Other students did not think GPT-3 was useful, writing that while they thought the technology was interesting and fun, it was far more work to try to get it to “help” with writing an essay than it was for the student to just write the thing themselves.

These reactions square with the results in more academic/less clickbaity articles about GPT-3. This is especially true about  Paul Fyfe’s “How to cheat on your final paper: Assigning AI for student writing.” The assignment I gave my students was very similar to what Fyfe did and wrote about– that is, we both asked students to write (“cheat”) with AI (GPT-2 in the case of Fyfe’s article) and then reflect on the experience. And if you are a writing teacher reading this because you are curious about experimenting with this technology, go and read Fyfe’s article right away.

Oh yeah, one of the other major limitations of GPT-3’s usefulness as an academic writing/cheating tool: it cannot do even basic “research.” If you ask GPT-3 to write something that incorporates research and evidence, it either doesn’t comply or it completely makes stuff up, citing articles that do not exist. Let me share a long quote from a recent article at The Verge by James Vincent on this:

This is one of several well-known failings of AI text generation models, otherwise known as large language models or LLMs. These systems are trained by analyzing patterns in huge reams of text scraped from the web. They look for statistical regularities in this data and use these to predict what words should come next in any given sentence. This means, though, that they lack hard-coded rules for how certain systems in the world operate, leading to their propensity to generate “fluent bullshit.”

I think this limitation (along with the limitation that GPT-3 and ChatGPT are not capable of searching the internet) makes using GPT-3 as a plagiarism tool in any kind of research writing class kind of a deal-breaker. It certainly would not get students far in most sections of freshman comp where they’re expected to quote from other sources.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here (and this is something that I think most people who teach writing regularly take as a given) is that there is a big difference between assigning students to write a “college essay” and teaching students how to write essays or any other genre. Perhaps when Marche was still teaching Shakespeare (before he was a novelist/cultural commentator, Marche earned a PhD specializing in early English drama), he assigned his students to write an essay about one of Shakespeare’s plays. Perhaps he gave his students some basic requirements about the number of words and some other mechanics, but that was about it. This is what I mean by only assigning writing: there’s no discussion of audience or purpose, there are no opportunities for peer review or drafts, there is no discussion of revision.

Teaching writing is a process. It starts by making writing assignments that are specific and that require an investment in things like prewriting and a series of assignments and activities that are “scaffolding” for a larger writing assignment. And ideally, teaching writing includes things like peer reviews and other interventions in the drafting process, and there is at least an acknowledgment that revision is a part of writing.

Most poorly designed assigned writing tasks are good examples of prompts that you enter into GPT-3. The results are definitely impressive, but I don’t think it’s quite useful enough to produce work a would-be cheater can pass off as their own. For example, I asked ChatGPT (twice) to “write a 1000 word college essay about the theme of insanity in Hamlet” and it came up with this and this essay. ChatGPT produced some impressive results, sure, but besides the fact that both of these essays are significantly shorter than 1000 word requirement, they both kind of read like… well, like a robot wrote them. I think that most instructors who received this essay from a student– particularly in an introductory class– would suspect that the student cheated. When I asked ChatGPT to write a well researched essay about the theme of insanity in Hamlet, it managed to produce an essay that quoted from the play, but not any research about Hamlet.

Interestingly, I do think ChatGPT has some potential for helping students revise. I’m not going to share the example here (because it was based on actual student writing), but I asked ChatGPT to “revise the following paragraph so it is grammatically correct” and I then added a particularly pronounced example of “basic” (developmental, grammatically incorrect, etc.) writing. The results didn’t improve the ideas in the writing and it changed only a few words. But it did transform the paragraph into a series of grammatically correct (albeit not terribly interesting) sentences.

In any event, if I were a student intent on cheating on this hypothetical assignment, I think I’d just do a Google search for papers on Hamlet instead. And that’s one of the other things Marche and these other commentators have left out: if a student wants to complete a badly designed “college essay” assignment by cheating, there are much much better and easier ways to do that right now.

Marche does eventually move on from “the college essay is dead” argument by the end of his commentary, and he discusses how GPT-3 and similar natural language processing technologies will have a lot of value to humanities scholars. Academics studying Shakespeare now have a reason to talk to computer science-types to figure out how to make use of this technology to analyze the playwright’s origins and early plays. Academics studying computer science and other fields connected to AI will now have a reason to maybe talk with the English-types as to how well their tools actually can write. As Marche says at the end, “Before that space for collaboration can exist, both sides will have to take the most difficult leaps for highly educated people: Understand that they need the other side, and admit their basic ignorance.”

Plus I have to acknowledge that I have only spent so much time experimenting with my openai.com account because I still only have the free version. That was enough access for my students and me to noodle around enough to complete a short essay composed with the assistance of GPT-3 and to generate an accompanying image with GPT-3. But that was about it. Had I signed up for openai.com’s “pay as you go” payment plan, I might learn more about how to work this thing, and maybe I would have figured out better prompts for that Hamlet assignment. Besides all that, this technology is getting better alarmingly fast. We all know whatever comes after ChatGPT is going to be even more impressive.

But we’re not there yet. And when it is actually as good as Marche fears it might be, and if that makes teachers rethink how they might teach rather than assign writing, that would be a very good thing.