How can we teach students to use ChatGPT within the writing process? 

I have struggled with arriving at a clear answer to this question. There’s an inherent tension between the various theories of composition and the actual experience of being an instructor of first-year composition. Many of the theories of composition work only in an idealized classroom in which 10 students are guided in writing by a well-paid instructor with a strong work-life balance, and they fall apart when they encounter the reality of the modern composition classroom, often led by an underpaid adjunct who teaches six 25-student composition classes across three universities to make ends meet. 

That tension only increases when faced with a paradigm-shifting technology like ChatGPT. The fact is that whatever composition theory has to say about generative AI, students will use it in their writing. So let’s consider how instructors can best lead them in this process. 

Some Background, Or, Skip This Section If You Aren’t Interested In Composition Theory 

As Janet Emig described it in 1969, the writing process consists of five steps: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. In the five and a half decades since Emig’s publication reinvented the field of composition, it’s been revised, iterated on, argued with, and supplemented, but it still remains the backbone of the college writing classroom, particularly as reframed by the cognitive-process theorists: 

Writing is a process of thinking. ¹

According to cognitive-process theorists, the writing process is not only a process of creation but a process of discovery, a crucial means by which students can name their thoughts, identify the rhetorical questions that arise in response to these thoughts, and refine their thoughts by responding to those questions. 

If this process of discovery, reflection, and refinement is the goal of creating writing, 

How can we integrate ChatGPT into the writing process in a way that preserves this discovery and refinement? 

Moreover, how can we guide students in integrating ChatGPT into this process, knowing they will use ChatGPT whether we teach them to use it well or not?

Let’s Get Practical. 

Using CGPT in the writing process needs to be scaffolded with critical thinking about ChatGPT and understanding its limitations and drawbacks. So consider this post a part 2, following Teaching Students to Think Critically About AI. 

Assuming you’ve already worked with your students to develop fluency in ChatGPT, here are some ways ChatGPT could be used at each stage of the writing process, opportunities to utilize ChatGPT in the process of discovery and refinement, and pitfalls to avoid. 

How Might We Integrate ChatGPT Into the Writing Process? 

Prewriting

During this first stage of the writing process, students could use ChatGPT to help them brainstorm a topic. ChatGPT could be used to:

• Generate topic options 
• Workshop an angle/refine topic and ideas 

Then, the student could take over from there for the drafting through publishing steps.

Benefits: 

• ChatGPT could take over the low-value task of topic generation, which is often where students spend too much time, shifting the cognitive load to more important stages of the process.
• This would save the instructor time that might be spent conferencing with students to brainstorm topics.

Drawbacks: 

• ChatGPT sometimes volunteers more information than just what is asked for, potentially inserting itself deeper into the process.
  • For example, I asked for topic ideas, then wrote a one-sentence statement of what I was going to use for my topic. ChatGPT responded by generating a full outline for the essay. Here is a link to the conversation. 

Drafting

To bring ChatGPT into the drafting step, a student could use it to brainstorm as described above, plus: 

• create an outline
• and/or generate a thesis
• and/or generate a first draft.

Then, the student would take the outline or first draft and continue the process, with a focus on evaluating the work (including fact-checking) and making it their own, then revising, editing, etc. 

As a possible extension of this, students could be tasked to follow this assignment with a meta-writing assignment reflecting on what changes they made and why. To facilitate this, have students use track changes as they revise and rewrite ChatGPT’s draft.

Benefits: 

• Students often spend the bulk of their time in the initial prewriting and drafting steps of the process and rush through the revision stage. Having students use ChatGPT to create a first draft would shift their focus onto the revision step of the process, helping them develop critical analyzing and evaluating skills. 
• It may be easier for students to get the distance necessary for analyzing, evaluating, and revising the work when it’s not writing that they generated themselves. 

Drawbacks: 

• Students would skip over the brainstorming and idea generation stages of the process, where discovery and problem-solving occur. 

Revising

To integrate ChatGPT into the revision stage, the student could create the first draft (potentially using ChatGPT for prewriting), then use ChatGPT to: 

• Suggest possible ways the student could expand on their ideas, reorder information, and refine wording.
• Explain why it suggested these changes. 

Then the student would evaluate these ideas and choose what to implement or ignore. 

Benefits: 

• This would model the revision step for students, which they often struggle with. 
• Using ChatGPT for revision would reduce the amount of time an instructor needs to spend in student conferences or providing draft feedback. 

Drawbacks: 

• ChatGPT is not a writing instructor. It does not perform analysis or critical thinking; it would provide advice that sounds plausible rather than demonstrating thoughtful revision. 
• It may make suggestions that contradict what’s taught in the classroom or otherwise mislead students. 

Editing/proofreading 

In using ChatGPT for editing and proofreading, the student would write the essay, and then ChatGPT could:

• suggest minor changes in wording
• spot surface errors.

Benefits: 

• Given the prevalence of technology that does this (e.g. Grammarly), teaching students to do this work on their own seems like a less productive use of their time; editing and proofreading may not be a skill they’ll need.
• Students can get practice identifying and prompting for tone, audience, formality, etc. 

Drawbacks: 

• Limiting ChatGPT’s scope is difficult. It may provide a more in-depth revision than simple editing and proofreading. 

The Problem of Ideology 

We must also be aware of the ways in which using ChatGPT in the writing process creates opportunities for bias. As Mirko Farina and Andrea Lavazza write in a June 2023 article in the journal Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, and other LLMs are trained on vast amounts of data from the internet, which inevitably contains biases and abusive content. Although it may not be immediately apparent, ChatGPT carries its own cultural perspective, which can influence the information it provides; and it has the potential to subtly reinforce existing gender, race, and class inequalities. This is a larger issue than can be addressed in one blog post, but it’s an important problem to keep in mind when considering how and when to use ChatGPT in the classroom. 

Conclusion 

ChatGPT has incredible potential as a supportive tool during the early stages of the writing process. Prewriting and early drafting can be high-effort, low-value tasks that eat up a lot of students’ and instructors’ time but lack the critical thinking payoff of evaluation and revision; instructor-directed use of ChatGPT for the prewriting and early drafting stages could free up time and energy for a deeper focus on revision. 

A recent post on the NCTE blog reaches the same conclusion. Val O’Bryan describes trying out ChatGPT to draft different kinds of essays. She writes, 

Despite limitations, ChatGPT remains a marvelous tool for helping students get started with the writing process: choosing a topic. As any instructor knows, a common complaint of students is “I don’t know what to write about.” … This tool can be used to help students over some of the initial hurdles in the writing process. ²

On the other hand, using ChatGPT in the later stages of drafting and, especially, revision can easily circumvent the critical-thinking-intensive revision process. It also gives plain old bad advice and can make students’ writing worse, not better. 

Using ChatGPT in the early stages of the writing process shifts the location of some of the discovering and refining that happens during the writing process, but it still makes space for them, especially when coupled with teaching students how to think critically about generative AI and demonstrating the drawbacks of using ChatGPT for revision. 

1. Flower, L., & Hayes, J. (1981). A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition and Communication, 32, 365-387. 
2. O’Bryan, V. (2023, May 7). Using ChatGPT to get started with the writing process. National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) blog. Retrieved from https://ncte.org/blog/2023/05/chatgpt-writing-process/.