See a large collection of writing handouts, including academic writing , creative writing, and business/professional writing.
“In every previous automation threat, the automation was about automating the hard, dirty, repetitive jobs,” said Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. “This time, the automation threat is aimed squarely at the highest-earning, most creative jobs that … require the most educational background.” In March, Goldman Sachs…
Shortly after my online AmLit survey began, I received two obviously AI-generated submissions. The responses did not address the prompt, there was no textual annotation and brainstorming assignment that was supposed to lead up to the written response, and the student did not take me up on my offer to meet to discuss how the…
I invest a lot of energy asking my college students to unlearn the pattern of summary and personal reflection that was enough to to earn a good grade in high school. I emphasize repeatedly that their high school teachers didn’t do anything wrong by teaching them what they needed to do in order to get…
In October, 2002, I was blogging about The stupidity of explosions in space movies The Chronicle of Higher Education rescues the briefly defunct Arts & Letters Daily The superiority complex An anti-telemarketing script An “I Love Lucy: bible study Why whitespace matters when creating a sign The coming air age of 1955 (as envisioned in…
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Do the headlines encourage empathy, or do they “other” the victims of crime? (Click to zoom in.) Similar:This morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For m…Jesus Christ SuperstarFor the Uniform #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 13) Sisko pursues former Federat…The Dog and the Oyster…
Today’s students have many strengths. They are great at collaboration, introspection, and remixing. While my students are very familiar with phone apps, even the English majors who want to be professional writers are not very familiar with the conventions of writing for the World Wide Web. Because their sense of “being online” mostly entails interacting…
When I worked at a radio news station in the late 80s, when I was about 20, I would often saunter into the newsroom a half hour before my shift started, so that I could sit down with a sandwich and a bottle of apple juice, and page through the newsroom’s copies of The Washington…
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Amy Silverstein writes a stunningly powerful guest essay in the NYTimes: Today, I will explain to my healthy transplanted heart why, in what may be a matter of days or weeks at best, she — well, we — will die. I slide my hand across my chest and speak aloud, palm to my heart’s crisp beating.…
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An amazing story of hope and dignity. That book club helped the inmates develop their analytical and communication skills. And out of that came a surprising insight: prison inmates read 9 times more books than civilians. So together with the National Justice Council, the Carambaia publishing house created a program called The Prison Reviews. The…
I’m still grappling with exactly how the rise of AI writing apps will affect my teaching. I don’t think it’s reasonable to ban technology from the classroom. While I will likely assign more in-class, hand-written activities, that strategy won’t work for online classes — and I am just not interested in requiring students to use…
“That was easy!” Today three different students made some variation of that statement. In that class, we are gearing up to write a research paper. I have broken the project up into multiple tasks, that I can grade quickly and generously. Today’s assignment asks students to submit a paragraph that argues the…
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A dedication in the script of a 1603 Ben Jonson play (Sejanus: His Fall) may have been written by Shakespeare, who appeared in that play as an actor. “It’s tantalising. There are so many parallels with Shakespeare’s style that it must surely make even the most hardened sceptic pause and think.” Initially intrigued, he had…
Police chief and writer Cliff Couch knows his audience. In a paragraph from an article advising LEOs how to deal with reporters, Couch begins with context he assumes his readers already accept, and carefully moves from there to the new ideas he wants them to consider. The horror tales you may have heard about reporters…
In September, 2002, I was blogging about “The Science of Scientific Writing” (1990) from ‘pong’ to ‘pac man’ Michigan Police fall for The Onion satire about terrorist telemarketers “Ebonics” (ebony + phonics) Silly alarmist story about recessive blonde genes A scientist undone by plagiarism Google News (when it was new) Mel Gibson’s plan to film…
From October: A man who was arrested over a Facebook parody aimed at his local police department is trying to take his case to the Supreme Court. He has sought help from an unlikely source, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Monday. –The New York Times,Area Man Is Arrested for Parody. The Onion Files a…
What is important to remember is that chatbots are autocomplete tools. They’re systems trained on huge datasets of human text scraped from the web: on personal blogs, sci-fi short stories, forum discussions, movie reviews, social media diatribes, forgotten poems, antiquated textbooks, endless song lyrics, manifestos, journals, and more besides. These machines analyze this inventive, entertaining,…