How Can We Teach Writing In A ChatGPT World?
At Forbes, I take a look at how ChatGPT could affect the teaching of writing—and in a good way.
Teaching with composition algorithms is comforting for both students and teachers. Students are anxious to know exactly which hoops they need to jump through to get that grade, and teachers who are less confident about teaching fuzzy art and craft of writing find in algorithmic writing instruction a set of concrete, easily measurable factors to use for grading. But the unfortunate side effect is that teachers end up grading students not on the quality of their end product, but on how well they followed the teacher-required algorithm.
Composition algorithms, sentence mechanics, and grammar all have their place. They are the tools of the writer’s work, and just as a builder needs to know the difference between a hammer and a nail gun and a screwdriver and a tape measure, young writers benefit from knowing their tools. However, we judge builders by the quality of their work, not by how well they hold a hammer.
ChatGPT won’t end any kind of writing instruction that shouldn’t have been ended. Writing for real, and not for performance, is personal and grows out of the writer’s thoughts and ideas, and that’s where writing instruction should be focused. Grow assignments organically out of class discussion and interest. Grade essays on how well the student communicated an idea, and not on how well they filled up the five paragraph template.
ChatGPT and other language software can help. They can be used to test the quality of a prompt; if the software can create a passable essay, then why ask students to do it?
And ironically, as more and more people play with ChatGPT, it’s becoming evident that to get a better result from the program, the user has to put the kind of detail and thought into their instructions that should be used for writing the essay themselves. ChatGPT is a dynamic demonstration that if you approach an essay by thinking “I’ll just write something about Huckelberry Finn,” you get mediocre junk. Better thinking about what you want the essay to be about, what you want it to say, and how you want to say it gets you a better result, even if you’re having an app do the grunt work of stringing words together.
Most writing problems are really thinking problems, and thinking problems are the problems that software is completely incapable of solving.