To echo Friedrich Nietzche, L'écriture est morte! (Writing remains dead. And we have killed it. How shall we comfort ourselves...? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become installation artists simply to appear worthy of it?)
I teach graduate and undergraduate writing classes at a university in Baltimore...for the past 40 years. Only a few months ago, an epochal event so catastrophic it seemed to stop all university professors—all teachers? everyone...who was paying attention?—in their tracks erupted onto the scene. It was Artificial Intelligence (AI), more specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), more specifically ChatGPT (Chat).
Now students could enter any professor’s writing assignment prompt into Chat, ask for the required number of pages, ask for research and bibliography, and, within seconds, get a document (in any language) that had more erudite content (though some might be “hallucinated”), more logical organization, clearer and more “professional-sounding” expression, and, coolest of all, the doc. would be “grammatically correct”....punctuated impeccably...spelled perfectly.
OMG....was the physical world coming to an end?
L'écriture est morte!
The initial response from my university and most others was to shoot this thing down. Policies were fired up prohibiting the use of LLMs for student writing, including threats of “F” grades for any student caught cheating in this way.
But Chat was extraterrestrial and could not be shot down so easily.
Some universities realized this and changed policies, trying to control use of AI, by allowing students to use Chat in some ways, with full disclosure, to assist them with “first drafts.”
But this May (2024), I sat in an English department faulty meeting, listening to smart, experienced, conscientious professors talk about how to control this ET-BOT, as though it were a mind-eating fungus.
My response? Writing is Dead...long live writing!
It’s not an original observation to state that we writing professors have a long history of grading products, not processes. We ask for a 5-page essay on X, etc. We may ask students for a first draft (rarely for an outline before any “writing” commences), allow students to “workshop” each other’s drafts, but finally a “final draft” is submitted, ready for a grade, which we stamp on the final page with a summary comment and some reference to the side comments we’ve made throughout the essay.
Obviously, if Chat is the main author of any student’s essay, what are we grading? How can we give credit to a student for adding 1 plus 1 and getting 2 when all they’ve done is enter information into a calculator and pressed ENTER?
It makes sense to me that the old notions of “writing” are substantially dead. No longer does a student get a writing assignment, do the research (remember “library books”?), create a note-card (ha) bibliography, and hash out perhaps an outline to help with the drafting, but eventually a first draft for the workshop and, of course, the final draft ready for the judge. Now, go to the free Chat site, enter the prompt, get the draft, disguise the wonky parts, check the bibliography to eliminate hallucinated references, and hand it in, expecting an “A” for such outstanding work.
What if professors—again, not an original idea—stopped grading the product and started grading the process? And what if “teaching” writing focused on how to prompt Chat? (As of May 21, 2024, according to ZipRecruiter, the average annual pay for a Prompt Engineer in the United States is $62,977 a year. That works out to approximately $30.28 an hour.) And what if that new writing instruction included tools for evaluating Chat-generated content, for developing objective standards for content and evidence, for filling in the weaknesses, for making the “style” more reader-friendly, for adding graphics, if possible?
What if writing professors graded the process (along with the product)?
I asked students in a junior/senior-level workplace writing course to “write” a report of 1,000 words based on a prompt on soil degradation on farmlands in the USA. I included a set of questions and concerns (why I happened to care about this issue) I actually had as their living-breathing reader/user (or, as writing teachers have defined this entity for centuries—their audience). I require them to use the free Chat app for the first draft. They had to include that first draft as part of what they gave me to grade. Then they were to use the tools taught in the class to evaluate the content in several ways and to “shape” the final content and presentation so it met my very-real needs. Finally, the students were required to write a “reflection,” discussing the experience of using Chat—how it helped and how it hindered—and explaining not just how they changed what Chat gave them but also why they had made those changes. The reflection could be as long as necessary but no fewer than 300 words.
I graded the process as well as the final product. It was interesting to note the difference between the language of the report they submitted and the language they used in their reflections, which, I assume they had written without Chat’s help.
Results? Far more engagement in the writing process, far more attention paid to “writing” decisions, and, maybe most important to me (the writing teacher), far more conscious application of the writing tools we’d studied in the class. As I’d been instructing them all semester, writers must Design A Reading Experience for their reader/user.
Instead of giving me GIFNIP (General Information For Nobody In Particular), the result many college essay-writing assignments seem to produce, they had done a pretty good job of giving me instrumental information I could actually use to address the specific concerns I had about this particular issue. Instead of getting an assignment back with a grade and comments on a PRODUCT, they got confirmation of what part of the process they had done well and what steps needed more attention.
In fact, a small group of students who were working in jobs where writing was required told me in their anonymous course evaluations (I was able to access only after the class was over and grades submitted) that they had used the writing tools they learned in the class to write at their jobs. They were excited that their writing was getting noticed, very favorably.
So, can we go on teaching writing as we’ve always done—without Chat? We could. But, as I see it, l’écriture est morte. The BOT from outer space has landed and spread itself throughout the land. Resisting is not an option. But, as my composition-specialist colleagues are fond of saying, there are AFFORDANCES here...new dance steps for the new dance that “writing” has become. I’m all in.
