WRITING PROGRAM

Upload your film review draft to a large language model (LLM—e.g., Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT) and write a variety of prompts asking it to analyze your draft and offer feedback and recommendations for revision. It would probably be a good idea to provide the LLM with some context about the assignment as well.

Here are some sample prompts to get you started. You don’t need to use all of these, and you should write additional prompts of your own that address what you think your draft needs most.

• Does my opening draw the reader in? How could I make it more engaging?
• Can a reader tell what I think about the film within the first few paragraphs, or is my judgment unclear?
• Does my review sound like something you’d find in The New York Times, or does it sound more like an academic essay? Point to specific passages that feel too academic or too casual.
• Am I assessing multiple elements of the film—such as performances, direction, cinematography, editing, or music—or am I leaning too heavily on just one?
• Find a place where I make a claim about the film’s merit without backing it up with reference to a specific moment or detail. How could I strengthen that passage?
• Does my review situate the film in any broader context—the director’s other work, its genre, current cultural conversations? If not, where might that kind of context fit naturally?
• Describe how my review moves from one point to the next. Does the structure feel logical, or do some paragraphs feel like isolated observations?
• Does my conclusion do more than restate what I’ve already said? Does it leave the reader with a strong final impression?
• Look at my title. Does it include the film’s title and a subtitle that reflects my perspective on it? What are some other potential titles?
• Do I have any grammatical errors? If so, can you identify them and tell me how to fix them—and how to avoid those types of errors in the future?

A word of caution: Don’t uncritically accept every response the LLM gives you. It may offer advice that would make your review worse rather than better. You are the author; the LLM is only a sounding board, and an imperfect one at that.

Revise and edit your review based on the feedback from the LLM that you find useful. Before the end of today’s class, we will have a think-pair-share exercise in which you reflect individually on the experience of working with the LLM, then share your thoughts with a partner, then discuss them with the entire class.

Note: Assignment adapted from Antonio Byrd’s “Using LLMs as Peer Reviewers for Revising Essays,” TextGenEd, edited by Annette Vee, Tim Laquintano, and Carly Schnitzler, The WAC Clearinghouse, 2023.

In small groups, develop a proposal for guidelines on acceptable and unacceptable uses of AI (such as Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT) when writing essays in this and similar classes. Your guidelines should address every stage of the writing process—from generating ideas and conducting research to drafting and revising.

Each group will create a short slide deck and present their proposed guidelines to the class. Your presentation should walk us through the writing process stage by stage, making clear what’s acceptable, what’s not, and why. Be specific enough that a student could consult your guidelines and know whether a particular use of AI is within bounds. Avoid vague language like “use AI responsibly” without explaining what that means in practice.

Here are some possible questions for you to consider:

• How would you distinguish between “AI-assisted writing” and “AI-generated writing”? To what extent is either approach acceptable?
• If you ask AI to generate a topic or an outline for your essay, is the resulting work still yours in any meaningful sense? Does it matter whether you revise the topic or outline afterward?
• When it comes to research, is it acceptable to ask AI to explain a concept you don’t understand? To find sources? To summarize sources you’ve already found?
• If a student uses AI-generated text in their work, what should be required—citation, disclosure, something else?