We are now teaching in an era where artificial intelligence is rapidly developing and becoming more integrated in our daily lives. While it’s true that AI is with us when we write an email (making suggestions for us) or google the best substitutes for coriander when we don’t have any on hand for a recipe, as writing teachers, we must especially consider how generative AI and large language models are changing our approach to writing.

There is much to consider when it comes to the ethics of AI use, particularly it’s environmental impacts, its labor practices, its entanglement with copy-right law. So, too, does GenAI make us question ideas like intelligence, authenticity, and originality. Thankfully, those of us who have been thinking about writing and how to teach it, especially in institutions of higher education, have a lot of knowledge that can guide us as we navigate this new era of automation. ((insert Warner’s quote))

In this way, we can be thankful to these emerging technologies for making us return to the important questions of our work: what do we ask our students to write? why do we ask them to create these written texts? and how do we teach, guide, and support our students as they work to produce these written products?

As we each figure out our approach to these emerging technologies, this site offers you some ways to engage your students in the writing process both with and without GenAI. We also accumulate resources for you to turn to as you discover and experiment with GenAI as writing instructors.

Encouraging writing WITHOUT GenAI

Each of the ideas in the list encourage students to engage in the writing process without using GenAI. The goal of these exercises and approaches to designing your writing classroom is to give students the time, space, and feedback to develop their writing skills independent of GenAI.

• Tell your students why you are not engaging with GenAI in your writing class. Take a day early in the semester to assign a reading about GenAI to your students and have a discussion about why you don’t want them using GenAI in your writing course. Use this time to hear about how they do or do not use GenAI (don’t assume they all use it the same way or at all). You might even ask them to experiment using GenAI in the room together: ask them to all give the same prompt to the same GenAI tool and see what results they got. This experience can highlight what GenAI does easily and what you hope they will do instead. Whatever you do, if you don’t want students using GenAI, make that clear and explain why, highlighting the learning, skill development, and habits of mind you want them to develop without GenAI’s influence.
• Be intentional when asking your students to write. Make sure that every time you ask students to write, you’re working towards an important learning objective in your course. ell them why you asked them to practice a writing skill like a literature review or a close reading. Be clear if they are writing to a real or imagined audience. If the audience is imagined (meaning you, the professor, are the only actual reader), explain how you want them to practice this skill with you so that they can transfer that skill to the real world. Working without a purpose is a drag. Let your students in on why you’re asking them to write.
  • Don’t shy away from creative and non-traditional writing assignments that move you and your students away from reading response posts and argumentative essays. Take for example Prof. Silber’s midterm script assignment that requires students to undertake traditional writing skills (read course materials, synthesize course materials in their own words, select important quotes from course readings, analyze said citations, develop a personal take on course materials) in a non-traditional form (a script). Asking students to develop a script engages them in the kind of spoken-inspired discourses they see on social media or at social events.
• Give thoughtful feedback that focuses on transferable writing skills. When you give feedback, make sure it is specific, precise, and not overwhelming. Don’t comment on everything. Instead, focus on 2-3 elements of a student’s writing or thinking that you want the student to focus on for the next assignment in your class. This will move students away from trying to produce papers as quickly as possible and help them develop writing skills that are resources in different writing scenarios.
• Let students practice the same writing task multiple times across a semester. Though the brain is not a muscle, you can ask students to practice the same writing task over and over again much like a basketball coach would ask a player to do layups again and again and again so that when it’s game time the player can do the layup with ease. In a writing classroom, this means assigning the same type of assignment multiple times and allowing students to revise and rewrite based on your feedback. They cannot learn if they cannot practice.
• Cancel some readings and schedule in-class writing days. It’s tempting to lecture every class. It’s even more tempting to assign a reading for each day your class meets. But if you are teaching writing, save time in-class to write. These in-class writing days offer you a chance to teach a specific writing skill and give students time to practice that skills. Writing days also allow you to meet with your students one-on-one and quite literally experience their writing process as they are writing. These days not only emphasize the work of writing – so much so that you’re providing a whole day of class time towards that work – but they also allow you to peek at your students as their write and provide just a small amount of surveillance around their use of GenAI.
  • Wesleyan’s Office of Academic Writing offers 8 predesigned 60-minute in-class writing workshops for faculty to request. They can either invite a member of the Office to teach these classes or request the lesson plan, script, and slides to teach the topic themselves.
• Adjust how you evaluate writing to release the pressure valve for students. Writing is subjective. What makes writing ‘good’ depends entirely on context, social norms, disciplinary expectations, and the like. When students are so focused on getting an A they are more tempted by technologies that can help them produce what they think is ‘good’ writing. Don’t let your students guess about what makes writing good. And if you don’t want them using GenAI, don’t rely on traditional or generalizable writing values when evaluating their work. Instead, produce specific rubrics that focus on the writing elements you want students to most focus on. You might also try labor based grading and give students points for producing drafts, handwriting quotes they love from course readings, or copy-editing paragraphs by hand.
  • Prof. Silber uses cover letters to get students thinking about their writing process. She explains “In order to emphasize the process of writing and the subjectivity of judgment when it comes to assessment, you must submit a cover letter (1-page max) with every writing assignment that explains your goals as a writer and how your writing (and revision) process influenced the version you are submitting for assessment. These cover letters are P/F and earn you 10% of your grade for the assignment. Please address these cover letters to me as I will read the letters before reading your final drafts. Be sure to address the following to earn all 10 points:
    • What were your goals for this paper? How did you approach these goals? Did you achieve them? Why/not?
    • What was your writing process for this project? Explain the decisions you made as you (re)drafted this project.
    • What feedback did you receive on your paper? How did you engage with feedback from your peers and instructors? Please cite specific examples of feedback and explain your choice to listen/not to what was shared.
    • What did you learn in writing this paper that you want to bring into future writing projects?
  • Many writing instructors use writing portfolios to emphasize the writing process. Instead of submitting a final, polished product, students submit drafts, notes, and a reflection on the writing process to receive points towards their final grade.

**A note on in-class, timed writing: Many faculty are returning to the days of blue-books where students hand write during class to avoid GenAI use. While this option helps avoid GenAI, it might get in the way of student learning. Timed, in-class writing emphasizes much of what students learned in high school — creating formulaic, standardized writing practices for timed testing. This environment reproduces the need to write efficiently and effectively instead of pushing students to experiment, practice, fail, and grow as writers.  

If you are going to do in-class, timed writing, think about whether you are using writing to assess learning or if you are asking students to learn how to write through practice. If it’s the former, you might want to change your grading to allow for elements of writing that emerge in these kinds of settings like typos, run on sentences and fragments, spelling errors, indecipherable handwriting, not being able to get everything out on the page in the allotted time – particularly for a generation of students who do not regularly hand write. Similarly, if you are trying to see if a student ‘understands’ material – you might want to move away from essay writing entirely. Essay writing helps students expose complicated and layered thinking. Thinking does not always translate well to the page without iterations. If you want to assess thinking through the essay form, try asking students to submit an outline or a page of quotes that they found and analyzed ahead of time. This will help you evaluate their thinking and their intentions along with the actual production of written text.

**A note on access and equity: People have certainly thought and spoken about how GenAI will reproduce social hierarchies, particularly when we look at paid subscriptions. But something to also consider is access and ability. For your disabled students, GenAI can be an important tool. For those with neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD, having a tool that can help with executive functioning is a game changer. For people with TBI that affect their language use, being able to have a tool to help produce grammatically correct writing is imperative. For people with physical disabilities that, for instance, make it hard to use their hands and fingers, being able to use AI helps them get their ideas onto the page, so to speak. For some students, using AI is a way to reach the standards that their brains/bodies can’t get to without support. They are not using AI to bypass learning. They are using AI to get to the place their neurotypical and ablebodied peers are at already. 

Encouraging writing WITH GenAI

We are still learning what it means to bring GenAI into the writing classroom. For those curious among us, we can educate our students (and learn from them) about ways to engage with AI that maintain a writer’s agency and authority as creators and thinkers.

• Allow students to use GenAI to copy-edit their writing. But make them reflect first! If students want to use GenAI to copy-edit, ask them to complete a short analysis and reflection project where they compare the version of the writing pre and post GenAI edits. This comparison should include analysis of the writing itself (what, specifically, was changed and why) and the writing process. Invite your students to think deeply about their desire for GenAI as a writing tool – does it make them feel more confident? less afraid of submitting their writing? more certain about their choices?
  • For example: Grammarly helps me know when to use semi colons. Grammarly makes me feel less nervous about submitting my writing because I know it’s grammatically correct. I’m not even sure if Grammarly teaches me why my grammar is wrong because it just makes suggestions and I accept them. I suppose Grammarly is contributing to my lack of confidence as a writer…
• Allow students to experiment with GenAI as they brainstorm ideas for a writing project. Give them ten minutes to put the prompt from class into the same GenAI tool during class. Then share out what responses each student received. Did everyone get a similar answer? Does the idea seem unique or innovative when you see it iterated 15 times over? Did someone experiment with different prompts and get different results? Discuss this experience as a class and think about what ideas are not seen in the results. Can students bring in more specifics from course readings and class discussions? This exercise often highlights the predictive nature of LLMs – they are not going to come up with the most unique approach, only the most probable based on their inputs.
• Ask students to use GenAI to outline their paper. Once they have outlines, have them transfer those outlines onto notecards where each ‘part’ of the outline gets its own notecard. Mix these notecards up and put them into pairs. Give the mixed up notecards to their partner and see if their peer can ‘puzzle’ the essay outline back together. Can someone reproduce GenAI’s organizational structure? Why or why not? Discuss the experience afterward to think more about why structure matters to our writing projects.
• Ask students to use GenAI like a thesaurus. Have them practice prompting GenAI for the ‘right’ word. Reflect on the kinds of prompts they used to get GenAI to ‘find’ the word they wanted. How is this experience similar and different to using a thesaurus?
• Ask ChatGPT or Gemini to answer an essay prompt using its deep research function. Request that include citations. See if the course materials you assigned in class emerge without prompting. Discuss this experience with students to talk about how GenAI decided what sources are ‘good’ evidence or not.

Additional Resources

coming soon!

For information on the basics of what a large language model is:

For more on writing and GenAI, check out:

• Anna Mills has been thinking about AI writing for awhile. Her professional website is a great place to start!
• The Writing Across the Curriculum’s open access publishing collaborative has a robust repository of information called “AI Text Generators and Teaching Writing” meant to introduce teachers to the world of AI and writing studies.