What are some potential advantages to instructors (and students) of incorporating generative AI into teaching with writing?

Generative AI may offer opportunities to instructors who teach with writing. This is a by no means an exhaustive list. AI has the potential to:

• Help writers during the writing process. If a writer has writer’s block, AI might help them get started. Similarly, if a writer experiences writing anxiety, or trouble getting started, engaging with a generative AI tool might help the student feel more comfortable.
• Support writers during the early stages of a writing project with brainstorming, idea generating, or with narrowing or focusing a specific topic. AI might also offer a student the chance to test out an idea or to imagine counterarguments to a particular assertion or hypothesis.
• Offer real-time writing support and feedback on their ideas in progress.Real-time writing support and feedback.
• Support multilingual writers in expressing ideas, with word translations, and can offer real-time grammar assistance. This could alleviate the stress that some multilingual (ESL) writers may experience when required to write in “standard” English. AI can serve as a potential language partner to writers.
• Encourage students to think critically about generated content, identifying biases, inaccuracies, or inconsistencies.
• Prepare students for the demands of the modern workforce.
• Help personalize learning: identifying areas of confusion and helping students develop the metacognitive skills to reflect on their writing processes.
• Help students incorporate multimodal elements into a writing assignment. For example, AI might help students consider and integrate polls, quizzes, images, videos, or graphics.
• Encourage instructors to redesign pedagogical approaches to writing and to consider what genres students need to know.
• Develop prompt engineering skills. Prompting chatbots or generative AI programs (sometimes called “prompt engineering”) can help students understand how to break a large topic or prompt down into a series of steps and deepen their thinking through repeated, increasingly complex questioning.