In the fall of 2023, about a year after the public release of ChatGPT, I decided to incorporate the new writing technology into my first-year composition course. My students were asked to experiment with using ChatGPT to generate topics and revise drafts. At this point, many of my students understood ChatGPT only as a cheating tool, but some were completely unaware of any of its capabilities.

Since students often struggled to land on specific topics to write about (when given a measure of freedom to do so), I created the following prompts to help them in the pre-writing process:

Prompt for exploring a topic:

Please help me prepare for writing my persuasive essay about a significant problem for Generation Z. Ask me questions–one at a time–that will help me come to a thesis, understand the strengths and weaknesses of my position and any opposing view(s). The problem I want to focus on is…

–or—

Please help me prepare for writing my persuasive essay about a controversial issue in my field of study. Ask me questions–one at a time–that will help me come to a thesis, understand the strengths and weaknesses of my position, and any opposing view(s).

Prompt for finding and understanding potential scholarly sources:

“Can you point me to some prominent researchers who have published on [insert topic] and very briefly summarize their positions?”

Prompt for testing a tentative thesis when you have a guess of what your position might be:

“Let’s engage in a dialectic exercise. I will present my tentative thesis, and then you will take the role of Socrates and ask me yes or no questions (one at a time) to expose any potential flaws or contradictions in my position.”

After the students completed a draft, we then focused on how ChatGPT/AI could help them improve the readability of their writing. To get the students to use the AI as tutor instead of a servant, we used the following prompt for revision.

“Please revise and improve the wording and punctuation of the following text (without adding any new ideas). Below the revised version, please include a numbered list of each specific individual change that you made to each revised sentence along with an explanation of why you made each change.“

Those prewriting and revision prompts served as an introduction to some of what ChatGPT could do beyond simply completing an essay for unscrupulous student in a time crunch. The last assignment of the semester attempted to incorporate ChatGPT in a different way and teach students to evaluate computer-generated text. Since the students had already written two persuasive essays, they were to chose one of them and have ChatGPT generate an essay that took the opposite or alternative position.

These are the instructions students were provided:

Objective: Evaluate a computer generated essay from ChatGPT. Use a formal style of academic writing to create your own original essay that is polished, sophisticated, and engaging to read. Apply what you have learned about sentence structure, punctuation, word choice, and tone to enhance the readability of your writing. Organize your ideas to logically support a clear thesis that draws a conclusion about the merits of the computer generated essay.

Step one: Have ChatGPT write an essay that takes the opposite position as one of your previous essays from this ENGL 1101 class.

Suggested Prompt: “Write an essay that makes the opposite argument as this thesis: [insert thesis from your previous essay]. The essay should be about 1000 words in length and include multiple direct quotations from multiple sources. All quotations should be cited in MLA format and a works cited page should be included at the end of the essay. The level of writing should be appropriate for a first-year college writing course.”

Step two: Carefully read the essay and evaluate the following:

Readability (sentence structure, punctuation, grammar, word choice, tone)

Evidence of clear thesis

Support for thesis (is it logical? Vague? Precise? Accurate? Organized?)

Credibility of quotations/sources (Do they actually exist? Are they scholarly?)

Adherence to the prompt (Did the machine do exactly what you asked? 1000 words? Multiple quotes? Multiple sources? MLA documentation?)

Step three: Assess your thoughts from step two and draw a conclusion about the overall merits of the computer-generated essay. This is your thesis statement.

Step four: Using the evidence from step two, write an essay that supports your thesis statement from step 3. The essay should be written in MLA format and at least 1000 words in length. The audience for this essay is your fellow students and your instructor, so use formal academic English. You may wish to use the strategy of compare and contrast for this assignment (using your own essay as the object of comparison/contrast), but you do not have to do this. Make sure your main points are clear (typically indicated in topic sentences for your body paragraphs) and that you transition logically form one point to the next. You must have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion that attempts to answer the question “So what?”

**You must include the text of the ChatGPT Essay (clearly labeled) after the conclusion of your own evaluation essay.

Sources/Documentation: No research or documentation is necessary for this assignment, but if you choose to include information from an outside source, you must use MLA documentation (signal phases, in-text citations, and works cited entries).

I think this assignment has held up well for a few semesters. The hope is that, because students should ideally have some emotional investment in the essay they wrote, they will be more critical of the AI-generated text response than they would if the AI text sample was random. Without this buy-in and inclination to defend their own writing/thinking, I believe first-year college students would be more willing to simply accept a computer-generated text as accurate and/or “better” than what they created themselves. The polished fluency of the computer-generated text is impressive enough for most students (and all readers, for that matter) to distract from other potential problems with the text, namely the inclusion of quotations and sources that do not exist.  The assignment also allows me to gauge for myself how generative AI is evolving over time and compare different generative AIs that students are using.