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Our goal is to work toward a responsible future that embraces AI in writing without dehumanizing it.

Vision

While AI that creates content may seem to undermine the work of writing educators and the advancements in written communication, we see a different future. We believe that properly harnessed, AI can enhance the writing process, making it more fluid, democratic, and inclusive.

Our vision is restrained generative AI, which will free up writers’ time to focus on critical thinking skills, planning, and communicating substantive ideas. This approach will also lift the cognitive and motivational barriers that have hindered the scaling of writing education. 

In the age of AI, responsible writing tools should guide students to use AI responsibly and ethically. By giving them agency over revision decisions and helping them focus their time on ideation and critical thinking, students develop the skills to assess the effectiveness of any text they author—regardless of who or what helps write it.

We envision a future where technology will complement human authorship by granting writers more time to reflect on the intentionality and accountability of their composing decisions. We envision a future where technology will broaden access to diverse populations of human writers, who, unlike machines, uniquely understand the immediate, personal, and historical context in which they seek to express themselves. We envision a future where technology will become a supportive partner in the development of critical thinking, which is fundamental to human learning. We envision a future where technology-enhanced writing tools, designed and deployed thoughtfully and strategically, can enhance our ability to write without displacing the human writer from the helm.

AI can make writing more effective by allowing writers to focus on the aspects of writing that only humans can do.

Approach

Our project explores this vision of restrained generative AI by investigating how to alleviate the challenge of juggling multiple cognitive demands inherent in writing. We examine how technology can enable instructors and students to focus on critical thinking, meaningful revision, and disciplinary learning.

myProse is an experimental writing development platform for higher education that we are developing and studying across multiple contexts—from first-year composition to writing in the disciplines—to understand how restrained AI can support writing development at different stages and in different settings.

myProse is designed to address specific needs across different educational contexts:

Writing Courses

• Facilitates classroom activities instructors already value, such as peer review discussions and model text analysis, to reinforce key concepts and develop students' metacognitive awareness of their composing decisions.
• Guides each student through multiple revisions with assignment-specific feedback during the drafting process, helping them develop awareness of their writing decisions as they make revisions.
• Helps instructors assess student work efficiently with interactive visualizations that support personalized feedback development while maintaining complete evaluation control.

Courses in the Disciplines

• Provides pre-submission feedback for students working independently outside the classroom, enabling instructors to receive better-developed drafts and focus their feedback on substantive disciplinary issues rather than foundational writing concerns.
• Enables rapid identification of how students address discipline-specific issues through interactive visualizations, making assessment and feedback more efficient and targeted.
• Develops students' disciplinary writing competencies through targeted feedback on field-specific conventions, helping them transition from general academic writing to the specialized discourse of their disciplines.

Student Success Services

• Enables quick pre-assessment of student writing before individual meetings, allowing consultants and support staff to identify key areas for discussion and make one-on-one sessions more focused and productive.
• Facilitates writing workshops with the same evidence-based activities used in writing courses, enabling staff to deliver effective writing development programming across writing centers, career services, and professional development programs.

Programmatic Assessment & Insights

Future directions include developing features that complement individual courses and support services. We envision that successful deployment of myProse will provide:

• Institution-level analytics on writing development patterns across courses and programs, enabling administrators to make data-informed decisions about curriculum design and resource allocation.
• Programmatic assessment support by tracking student writing growth over time and across contexts, helping institutions demonstrate learning outcomes and writing proficiency development.

History

For the past twenty-five years, we have explored how digital writing environments incorporating Natural Language Processing and interactive visualization might ease the cognitive load of writers and enhance their experience of the writing process. A suite of these experimental digital tools, called DocuScope, was designed to offer automatic feedback, with the aim of maintaining a writer’s engagement without the need for teacher supervision. Our digital work predates the rise of generative AI; but, we have discovered that the strategic deployment of generative AI complements our vision of placing the human writer at the forefront of the writing process, while also democratizing access to an enhanced writing process for a broader population.

Media Coverage

Nature | September 4, 2024

Carnegie Mellon News | June 26, 2024
Generative AI for Educators: Three Seed Grants Awarded for Research & Development

EdSurge | May 23, 2024

FastCompany | May 23, 2024

Collaborating Units

• Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation, Â鶹´å
• Open Learning Initiative, Â鶹´å

Acknowledgments

• Seed grant program for the research and development of generative AI-enabled educational tools, Â鶹´å
• Dietrich College of Humanities & Social Sciences, Â鶹´å
• Department of English, Â鶹´å
• Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation, Â鶹´å
• Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation, Â鶹´å