Course Overview
In this course, you will learn how to use and evaluate Generative AI (GenAI) tools for writing. Through frequent experiments with these tools, you’ll deepen your understanding of how GenAI may affect your writing, writing process, and development as a thinker and writer. Additionally, through readings and class discussions, you’ll learn about AI as an emerging technology with social, cultural, economic, and environmental impacts. Overall, the course will help you develop both a more informed position about whether and how GenAI belongs in your writing practice and a sharper understanding of how to assess arguments for and against AI.
learning outcomes
Upon successful completion of the course, you will be able to:
- Compose texts in a variety of genres with assistance from GenAI applications at various stages of your writing process
- Draw on theories about how and why people write to articulate potential impacts of GenAI on your development as a writer and thinker
- Monitor and discuss the emerging social, cultural, economic, and environmental impacts of AI
- Articulate an informed personal position about whether and how you will integrate GenAI into your writing practice
Readings & Media
Bogost, I. (2025, November 26). Welcome to the Slopverse. The Atlantic.
Cardon, P., Fleischmann, C., Logemann, M., Heidewald, J., Aritz, J., & Swartz, S. (2024). Competencies needed by business professionals in the AI age: Character and communication lead the way. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, 87(2), 223-246.
Flower, L., & Hayes, J. R. (1981). A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition and Communication, 32(4), 365–387.
Gallagher, J. R. (2025a, July 18). The curious question of AI-written lists: Or, LLMs are genre machines. John Gallagher’s Technology Newsletter.
Gallagher, J. R. (2025b, April 8). Prompt engineering: The hard way [Video]. YouTube.
Guo, A., Sathyanarayanan, S., Wang, L., Heer, J., & Zhang, A. X. (2025). From pen to prompt: How creative writers integrate AI into their writing practice. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Creativity and Cognition, 527–545.
Hsu, H. (2025, June 30). What happens after A.I. destroys college writing? The New Yorker.
LeGuin, U. K. (2015). Excerpts from Steering the craft: A twenty-first-century guide to sailing the sea of story. Harper Perennial.
Merchant, B. (2025, November 28). “I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off.” Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry. Blood in the Machine.
Mollick, E. (2025, August 7). An opinionated guide to using AI right now. One Useful Thing.
Muldoon, J., Graham, M., & Cant, C. (2024). Feeding the machine: The hidden human labor powering A.I. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Somers, J. (2025, November 3). The case that A.I. is thinking. The New Yorker.
Vara, V. (2023, September 21). Confessions of a viral AI writer. Wired.
Winsor, D. A. (1989). An engineer’s writing and the corporate construction of knowledge. Written Communication, 6(3), 270–285.
Course Assignments
Short GenAI Writing Experiments & Reflections: Over the term, you will experiment with GenAI for a range of writing tasks, such as creating and polishing draft text, finding and interpreting scholarly sources, reviewing drafts, and creating visuals. You will complete five graded experiments, each accompanied by a short reflection on your process and the experiment’s results.
GenAI Editorial: In the first half of the course, we will discuss a range of concepts from both research and personal narratives about the roles GenAI can serve for writers, the value of writing for personal learning and growth, the specific ways writers and workplaces are integrating GenAI, and the pressures on writers to use or not use GenAI. To articulate your emerging response to these concepts, you will craft an approximately 1000-word editorial for The DePaulia that aims to persuade the paper’s readers of your current position on how GenAI should or should not be integrated into college reading and writing practices. Editorials take a clear stance and support it with reasoning and evidence, while also acknowledging counterarguments; to do this, you will engage ideas from at least three of our course sources. The DePaulia’s audience includes both students and faculty, and you may choose one or the other as your primary audience.
GenAI Position Statement: At the end of the term, you’ll write an approximately 1500-word position statement that articulates where you stand on AI—not just how you want to use GenAI as a writer, but how you feel about the technology, given what you’ve learned about AI’s effects on cultures, labor, creativity, and the environment. The statement is a place to acknowledge tensions that don’t neatly resolve and to connect your personal practices to broader systemic concerns.
Class Engagement: Class engagement includes participation in class discussions and activities, as well as on-time and thorough completion of assignments to prepare for class. These preparatory assignments include annotating readings, writing short responses, and working on a team to prepare to facilitate a class discussion.