AI Review of Project Draft
Attribution: Assignment is based on Ehren Pflugfelder’s work and adapted with his permission
Purpose
I want students in an advanced [technical writing] course to gain familiarity with some of the tools that professional [writers] also use, AI included. For this reason, you’ll be eliciting AI-generated feedback on your [multi-week, staged project] that will complement the feedback provided by human peer reviewers, that is, your classmates, in a separate peer review assignment that you’ll complete concurrently with this one. This gives us an opportunity to see how there are some advantages to AI help and some limitations, too. It will also give you an opportunity to improve your draft of the [multi-week, staged project] while also developing your discernment around what feedback, AI or human-generated, is useful to you.
Learning Outcomes
This assignment has several goals:
- To generate useful AI output by formulating effective prompts for an AI tool employed by professionals in this field.
- To assess the value of AI-generated feedback in comparison with peer feedback.
- To plan modifications of your work based on the areas of that feedback that you judge as valid and valuable.
Instructions
For this assignment, we’re heading back to [the AI tool intro’d earlier in the term, e.g. Microsoft’s Copilot AI], so you’ll want to log back in and refamiliarize yourself a bit. Our goal for this interaction with [said AI tool] is to see if it can help us with improving [a specific aspect, e.g. the editing] of your draft of the [multi-week, staged project]. A draft of that project is due on [day] of this week, so you should have that draft on hand for this assignment. What I’d like you to do is to create prompts for [said AI tool] that ask for [editing] assistance about specific sections of your project—which you’ll then paste into your prompt for [said AI tool] to analyze. It may be helpful to review our previous activities for prompting [said AI tool] that emphasized how to write useful prompts (the tips from earlier in the term are included below). So, for this assignment:
- Choose a section of your project that you’d like some feedback on.
- Write a prompt for [said AI tool] offering it some context for the project, asking for [editing] suggestions for that specific section.
- [Said AI tool] may simply understand your request for [editing] suggestions as an invitation to [re-do, e.g. rewrite, recalculate, etc.] that section, so ask [said AI tool] to provide its [editing] suggestions for that specific section in a numbered list (this may take a few attempts). Your goal here is to generate recommendations you can follow when revising your own work, not to get [said AI tool] to do the work for you!
- Cut-and-paste the section of your draft you worked on and the numbered list of [editing] suggestions generated by [said AI tool] into a text file.
- Write a brief reflection (about 100-200 words) about whether [said AI tool’s] suggestions were helpful or not. Which pieces of advice do you think you’ll use and which suggestions were less than appropriate, given your goals for a specific section of your project? I also recommend that you go back to some of our lessons on [skills you’ve already developed and criteria for what constitutes quality work] that were mentioned in earlier course readings and lectures to see how [said AI tool’s] suggestions square with how quality work is defined in our field.
- Later in the week, when two of your classmates have provided their peer reviews of your project draft, return to this assignment and address the following in another reflection of 100-200 words:
- Did your peers’ suggestions have anything in common with [said AI tool’s] suggestions? Why do you think those suggestions were similar or different?
- Which form of feedback, AI, human-generated, or some combination, stands the greatest chance of pushing your work to the next level? Why?
- Make a final list of the changes you will make to your project draft, based on both forms of review.