“Is the College Essay Dead?”
In the wake of Open AI releasing Chat GPT in November 2022, The Atlantic published a provocative article about the implications of this new technology on, among other things, grade school writing assignments, homework, admissions, and college essay writing. It’s worth reading! In fact, as a writing coach, I have to admit it’s crossed my mind that bots like Chat GPT may, in fact, compromise GreenMark’s mission and value — part of me is hopeful of that, because college counseling and essay coaching can be and often are party to a toxic industry; those who improperly vet student writing or, even worse, ghostwrite on their behalf do little good in helping young writers think about the nature of the written word.
One other part of me is hopeful that the advent of AI tools like Chat GPT, Bard, Bing GPT, among others, may actually be important technology that both students and writing coaches like myself my leverage to create as a baseline folks’ writing. In the years to come, we’ll see how schools, employers, and others reckon with AI tools, but in the meantime, I see these innovations as an opening to teach students another avenue into digital literacy. This is my way of saying to prospective students not to be wary or fearful about using Chat GPT, but rather to embrace it as part of the creative journey of developing as a writer!
All that said, one other part of me still harbors skepticism about AI tools’ communicative power this early on. Here, for example, I’ve taken the Chat GPT output published at the beginning of The Atlantic article and pasted it here:
The construct of “learning styles” is problematic because it fails to account for the processes through which learning styles are shaped. Some students might develop a particular learning style because they have had particular experiences. Others might develop a particular learning style by trying to accommodate to a learning environment that was not well suited to their learning needs. Ultimately, we need to understand the interactions among learning styles and environmental and personal factors, and how these shape how we learn and the kinds of learning we experience. (88 words)
Just as the author and his interviewees explain, this is pretty good for an AI bot! That said, what I’ll try to do here is break down where and how this paragraph might be improved:
First Sentence — the sentence is 21 words long and is therefore wordy; the sentence deploys the “to be” verb twice; the sentence begins with an inanimate subject in “construct” and therefore forces the bot into writing a lengthy sentence with “to be” verbs; the sentence is written in the passive voice.
Second Sentence — “Some students” contains sticky language and is vague; the sentence repeats the word “particular,” though it’s unclear whether that repetition is deliberate; and the sentence contains two vague phrases in “a particular learning style” and “particular experiences.”
Third Sentence — this sentence repeats “a particular learning style”; the sentence continues to deploy the “to be” verb (“was”); the sentence deploys the negation (“not”); the sentence ends with more vague language (“learning needs”)
Fourth Sentence — the sentence is 29 words long and is therefore wordy; the sentence contains vague language (“interactions,” “learning styles,” “environmental and personal factors”); the sentence deploys what I call interrogatives (“how” is deployed twice)
Now, here’s how I might improve the communication, flow, rhythm, and cadence in this bot’s paragraph:
Scholars harbor skepticism about “learning styles” as a construct. Principally, it fails to account for processes that explain those styles. For example, some might develop a particular learning style from narrow life experiences, whereas others might do so by accommodating to a learning environment hardly suited to their learning needs. Academics may benefit from researching the interaction of learning styles against environmental and personal factors. In doing so, they’d discover more about learning and its typologies. (76 words)
Now, is this revision perfect? Far from it. But could one argue that it’s clearer, more concise, and purposeful? I’d say so. Though AI tools like Chat GPT might actuate schools, colleges, and universities to rethink how they evaluate students, know that computer scientists are not quite there yet in producing technologies that themselves produce quality writing.
Whatever the case, given the advent of this fascinating technology, the questions I’ve been thinking about are does the revision process matter to writers and readers and will institutions of higher learning make adjustments to their screening processes to account for this up-and-coming technology? My hope about the former is that they will, and my suspicion about the latter is that they won’t — admissions protocols assume some amount of malfeasance. GreenMark in no uncertain terms condones cutting corners; it aspires for students to catch sight of that wordy sentence or to address that dangling modifier!
More to the point, I cannot help but reiterate that GreenMark cares less about the admissions process than it does about the writing process. Though those two processes may be no different to applicants, they are separate and apart to me, as I care about students thinking critically about planning, ideation, theme development, outlining, and drafting through substance, mechanics, and diction.
Let’s see a bot do that ;-)