Today’s Plan:
- Eyman’s Article and Assignment
- How I Aim to Transform the Assignment
- A Schedule of Sorts
- What are the levels of editing?
- How do we transform the levels of editing into prompt engineering?
- What AI technologies should we include in this study?
Eyman’s Article and Assignment
We can find Doug’s article here.
A major difference: Eyman tested the ability of AI technologies to summarize complex technical documents. Makes sense, he was teaching a technical writing class. Given the nature of our major, I am more interested in testing its ability to *aid* and/or *transform* the editing process. Let me clarify several different research questions and ask you which one(s) you find more interesting/productive:
- Are we asking if AI helps people learn to edit?
- Are we asking if AI helps people who know how to edit [in our case, you have taken at least ENG 327 Editing or JMS 350 News Editing and have a fundamental knowledge of and experience with the levels of editing]
- Are we asking if AI can edit papers and testing the effectiveness of different approaches to prompt engineering?
- Are we asking if, provided a general prompt to edit, AI can edit papers effectively (note: I don’t think I care about this 4th question).
As I noted, you all took a different approach to the first project, which was awesome because I got to see a wide range of results. That’s interesting! Here, however, I would like more focus–I am less interested in “wow that’s interesting” and more determined to “make some fucking knowledge,” in part because I just submitted a sabbatical application that says I will write about the knowledge we make in this class (and I’m going to write about the first project too–but I want an article that demonstrates the value of experimenting and working with AI.
So, I am open to having different teams with different foci–maybe we pick two of the four questions above? Let me hear some gut responses.
How I Aim to Transform Eyman’s Assignment
I wrote an assignment description back in August. Let’s revisit that.
A Schedule of Sorts
- Week 10 (next week): develop materials for prompt engineering (whatever research question we decide on, lets collaborate on approaches). Review levels of editing materials. Build our research methodology (I used to call this stage of the qualitative research project “building an analysis machine” but I think that will get confusing–“build a little machine to test the machine”).
- Week 11 (Oct 29/31): Do the editing/machine thing.
- Week 12 (Nov 5/7): Do more editing/machine thing? Or start the writing?
- Week 13 (Nov 12/14): Finish the writing. A reflection doc, some synthesis.
- Week 14 (Nov 19/21): Final Project Proposal. Work on final project.
- Week 15 (Thanksgiving, No School): Work on final project.
- Week 16 (Dec 3/5): Work on Final Project
- Final Class Session: December 13th 10:45-1:15
Levels of Editing
Here’s where I once again admit that I am not an editor. My knowledge of editing is quite limited; when I think of editing, I think of “substantive editing” (helping to develop content), “copy editing” (helping to identify areas of confusion, make sure content is rhetorically directed to its audience), and “proofing” (sweating all the small details and grammatical foibles).
So I reached out to Jordan Smith, who gave me a resource. It is in Canvas. I also scanned a few entries from the Alred et al’s Handbook of Technical Writing (the book I used to use in ENG 301). No I didn’t, but I will!
Update: Jordan just sent me this, which seems like a good introduction.
What AI Editing Services Should We Use?
- ChatGPT
- Jasper
- Rytr (business)
- WordTune
- Sudowrite (fiction)
- Type (seems right on)
- Grammarly
- QuillBot
- AutoCrit (more creative writing)
- See Writer in this article
