A few months ago, I was laid off from my side job writing content-driven ads for a car service company. As a songwriting instructor and occasional creative writer, I’ve been plagued by emails saying, “We’re making some changes to our content priorities and production volumes. Unfortunately, they won’t be available for the next few hours.” I acknowledge that week. “In the end, I was very loyal to my research and writing. It didn’t help that the editor who fired me was just a little older than most of my students.”
After exchanging a few emails with her, I began to wonder if I had been replaced by an artificial intelligence writing program. Unfortunately, I had to agree that an AI bot would likely do my job more efficiently. When my side hustle started, my editor kept demanding that I churn out articles in about 20 minutes for him to write three short articles on topics related to car care and travel. , was paid an hourly rate of $25. The problem is, it took her over 20 minutes to write an article on topics like “How do I replace an EGR valve?” and “Where’s the battery in my 2012 Mini Cooper?” I was. Of course, as a non-auto mechanic, I could have been replaced by an AI bot. It makes perfect sense.
I take a small leap and assert that yes, AI writing programs like ChatGPT are the future of writing, or at least the future. many of sentences that people produce. With that said, what does this mean for teaching students to write well? Our focus is on helping students become good editors. I think.
A good editor is someone who understands the rhetorical situation and how to read clearly written prose. I also know how to check for correctness, both in terms of content and conventions. Attention to detail is essential. But does a good editor have to be a good writer himself?Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maxwell, the legendary editor of Thomas Wolfe in his 2016 on Perkins In an article in 1999, one of his biographers wrote: I know that Perkins’ letters to famous authors have been published, but I don’t know that he published anything of note outside of those collections.
Therefore, an effective editor may or may not be an extraordinary writer, but he must be a good critic. And it’s this skill, even if most writing instructors haven’t neglected to at least skim through over the years, largely due to time constraints. Someone who approaches writing with an awareness of both the strengths and weaknesses of content and style. Teaching students to be good critical readers takes time, and instructors must develop activities that draw students’ attention to details in well-written texts, such as social her annotation assignments.
Of course, the underlying dilemma of AI-generated text is that No student’s own writing. But what does “own writing” mean? Before his spelling check, my writing was “on the edge of illiteracy,” as one of my English professors once wrote in the margin of an essay on Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale.” Until spell-checking came along, I struggled and often didn’t know how to look up words in his familiar Webster dictionary. In all honesty, my “my writing” could surprise colleagues who believe in spelling conventions today, even if they were put in a room with nothing but pencil and paper and no other aids. .
Until recently, many of us composers were skeptical of programs like the writing aid app Grammarly and the citation generator. In the early 2000s he showed students that EasyBib was often wrong about the MLA format. They were not impressed with my show and tell, which was intended to instill in them the importance of understanding the basic concepts of the MLA format and allowing them to create their own entries from scratch. I did. Over time, I’ve come to understand their resistance.Why not turn to technology for help? After all, the only thing more boring than formatting a page of cited work is teaching others how to do it. Currently, I direct my students to use the citation generator and act as an editor to check my work against resources such as Purdue OWL.
When it comes to Grammarly (and other similar programs), I’m a recent convert. After hearing rumors from other instructors that it “won’t work”, I didn’t bother to investigate. Then, before a semester, one of my best students, him, showed me how to use Grammarly to improve my writing. Looking over her shoulder, I found that I agreed with most of the editing suggestions, and I used a comma to correct some of the problems she had with her splices and sentence fragments. discussed how it can be used.
Still, there are existential differences between spell-checking and AI-generated writing. Computer programs can be leveraged to lessen the hassle of proofreading spelling, grammar, and citation errors, but these programs have failed to allow students to pass without correction (at least for some of their time). The text is generated on behalf of the student and replaced by the student’s self-generated text. Such use of AI is inherently fraudulent.
While discussing academic integrity will undoubtedly become part of future conversations with students, writing instructors are encouraged to introduce the limitations of technology as a way to persuade students to consider using technology. It is recommended. Recent articles in the press cite instructors keen to condemn what ChatGPT is creating. A history professor at one university declared that the program would have given the spit out to a test prompt of “If he could F-“. Just like I practiced with his EasyBib 20 years ago, type in essay his prompts before a first grade writing class, have students annotate papers socially, edit and fact-check You can imagine having them practice their skills.
The debate over the role of AI-generated writing in academia will probably go on for years, but in the business world it may already be a solved problem, as my experience writing advertising copy shows. This means that educators will do well not only to coexist with technology, but also to find ways to incorporate it into our teaching methods. Training to be a good editor is an ambitious goal, one that requires big changes for many of us, but it is also a task that we hope to accept sooner or later.
