Incorporating ChatGPT into a Business and Professional Writing Assignment

It was a fine Spring afternoon. Everyone had their lunch and was in an excellent mood of sharing their insights. I attended MnWE 2024 virtually but could still feel the scholarly and friendly vibe of the conference. I presented my paper titled “Chat with It, Don’t Copy and Paste: Teaching Ethical Consideration of Using ChatGPT in a Writing Classroom” under the panel “AI Ethics”. While reading my paper, I shared what I do to incorporate ChatGPT in my Business and Professional Writing courses. I am happy to share the assignment with the readers of the MnWE journal.

What I Do:

First, I break the ice and let the conversation about AI melt in my classroom as Flower Darby suggests that instructors need to introduce ChatGPT and talk about it in the class. Since Business and Professional Writing is an upper-division course, my students come to the class with a minimum knowledge about AI in writing contexts. I have noticed that some of my students already use ChatGPT to compose their documents. Joseph M. Keegan writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education that many students are seen submitting their works “entirely copied from ChatGPT”. So, the question regarding the pedagogical use of ChatGPT centers around “to what extent” students can use ChatGPT in their writing processes. What is expected? AI-generated or AI-assisted writing?

To explore these questions, I designed an assignment for my student. The assignment is a traditional Interview Q/A assignment for Business writing students. This is what I usually do in the 5th week of the course when students already have their job documents ready for a particular job position at a specific company. This semester, I encouraged my students to prepare a set of interview questions based on the job position and company they aspire to work in. Then I told them to write answers to those questions and use ChatGPT afterwards.

First, I observed how they use ChatGPT independently. I noticed that my students write the question in the chat box and ask ChatGPT to generate answers. The answer they got as a response to the given prompt was what we call ChatGPT-generated answer: without context, without personal touch and without personal connection. ChatGPT can do freewriting, but it cannot write freely. It generates texts only based on the prompts provided by human writers.

Then, I encouraged my students to provide enough information about the job position and their backgrounds and then see what answer is generated by the writing tool. Surprisingly, my students were never convinced by the answer. Instead of submitting an AI-generated answer, they edited their answers and submitted an AI-assisted answer sheet. Finally, my business writing students wrote a reflective memo and shared their honest experience of using ChatGPT in their writing process.

I provided them with the following prompts for the reflective memo:

1. Were you familiar with ChatGPT before doing this assignment?
2. What prompts did you provide to ChatGPT along with the interview questions?
3. Could ChatGPT contextualize the answers? What have you noticed?
4. What about ChatGPT’s choice of words? Do you use the same or similar words while writing your answer?
5. In your opinion, do you find ChatGPT a reliable writing tool?
6. How did ChatGPT help or hinder you from revising your answer? What changes did you make in your own writing after reading ChatGPT-generated texts?
7. Will you use this Chat bot in the future? If yes, in which writing situations do you think ChatGPT can be a useful tool?

What I Learned from my Students’ Responses:

What I got to know from the reflective notes of my students is that most of them were familiar with the use of ChatGPT even before I introduced it to them in one of my writing workshop classes. They came up with a few cool ideas of using ChatGPT for writing their answers. A few of them just wrote about their background and the job they target and let ChatGPT write the answer for them. They used prompts like “write the answer based on this:”.

I encourage my students to focus on 3 P’s while crafting a professional document: professional, personable and persuasive. So, some of my students decided to write their answers first and then wrote prompts like “reword it”, “rephrase it” and “make it sound better”. The answer ChatGPT then generated had a different “P”: Polished! A few of my students showed a resistance against ChatGPT-generated polished answers. They wrote, “but, this is not my voice. This is not how I write”. I was glad that they decided to stick to their own unique voice which is always growing dynamically.

How MnWE 2024 Added More Insights to my Assignment:

The name of ChatGPT is self-referential. It is a Chat bot! When my students chatted with this tool, they provided personal information. I personally feel uncomfortable with and unsure of providing my personal information to any non-human chat bot. When a couple of my students did it, I felt obligated to talk to them about the security issue of making ChatGPT write for them. I told them that their information is not safe with ChatGPT. It has no autonomy of its own which would guarantee a safety net for the students’ voices and information.

My assumption was confirmed after listening to an expert at the MnWE 2024 conference. One of the presenters in the panel “AI Ethics”, Jaqueline Herbers from Viterbo University shared some concerning insights about how AI like ChatGPT and Grammarly are capable of using writers’ information for many tech companies’ gains. Her presentation was thought provoking to me. After the conference, I held another open discussion about ChatGPT and AI with my students and shared what I learned from the panel. MnWE 2024 enhanced my knowledge about AI in writing.

All I say is that ChatGPT can only provide fish to the hunger-stricken individual whereas writing teachers teach them how to fish. The writing scholars are doing a wonderful job to incorporate ChatGPT and other AI tools in the current world with AI. The more we talk and write about it, the more we share our ideas with each other, the better support system we can create for our students! Let’s meet in the next MnWE and share some more cool ideas!