#rhetcomp

In the rhetoric classes I teach, one of the first conversations my students and I have is about bias. We work through questions about what is biased and what is not biased, eventually arriving at the realization that everything is biased. My students begin by saying something is unbiased when it is "just the facts," but then we start to question who decides what the facts are, what facts are included, what facts are excluded, what facts are listed first, what facts are listed in the footnotes, what facts are alluded to but not stated outright, and what facts are taken out of context or put into a context they were not originally in. So then, we talk about how to identify bias, how to navigate it, and how to understand how it impacts the rhetorical purpose of the text. This is part of a rhetorical reading, followed by rhetor and audience analysis, along with specific identification of rhetorical appeals to reasoning, emotion, and credibility.

We also talk a little about propaganda, but not as much as I would want to. We talk about understanding all texts as rhetorical situations in which we may be the primary audience, or secondary audience, or tertiary audiences. And how all texts have a rhetorical purpose, and most of them have more than one--how a text might seem like it is addressing a specific individual publicly, but it is also addressing all the people witnessing this individual being addressed in the hopes that this secondary audience will exert pressure on the individual. And so on. How propaganda pushes a political line by referencing and appealing to the imagined and actualized values of the audience. We talk about veracity and speciousness--how there are things that seem like they could be true and so are treated as true, and how there are things that defy belief and so are treated as false, but that these are not truth claims in and of themselves; how there are truth claims that are at least partially true, but maybe they are in a different context, or maybe they are true on a small scale but not on the scale they are presented as. A grain of truth becomes a 50 lb bag of sand becomes a sandy beach that stretches for miles. And how propaganda is not inherently bad, but it is inherently rhetorical in how it emphasizes the call to action, the call to belief, for the audience.

We do not talk about agitation propaganda, which is what I think we should be talking about. The propaganda designed to galvanize and agitate the audience, the propaganda designed to push as much as the audience can be pushed, and then create new space to push more. The propaganda that emphasizes the extremes and the exceptions, disrupting the median or the norm or the average, in an effort to upset complacency. Again, this propaganda is not inherently bad or even false. (I think people hear the word propaganda and think "propaganda means lies" but that's not what it means). But this propaganda takes a perspective and carries it further. It is invigorating and exciting and arousing and radicalizing in the way it reveals how close you are to your convictions.

At this point, submitting student work to AI detectors violates your students' intellectual property rights. This is also true for plagiarism detectors like Turnitin. Students have a right to their own intellectual property, and submitting it to AI detectors and Turnitin means they may lose intellectual property rights, their work may be reproduced without their consent, and it may be used for research purposes without their informed consent. All of this is cop behavior, in my opinion.

Making students do in-class, timed writings under pressure instead of take home essays will not make them better writers. There is tons of research in writing studies to support this (I can link to it if people are interested), and we've known this for a long time. But for literally fifty years, writing studies has almost unanimously agreed that the way to support the development of student writing is to teach writing as a process wherein drafting, seeking feedback, and revision are the priorities. This also has the added benefit of increasing accountability because students must demonstrate sustained focus on a single project.

One of the best ways to discourage AI-generated writing is to give students prompts where they have to engage with the text in a very specific, localized, and/or personal ways. Changing prompts from vague analysis disconnected from their daily lives to engaged, personal prompts will challenge your students intellectually and creatively. Instead of giving vague prompts, find ways to connect prompts to the city you're in, the communities your students are from, the local people in your world. This is possible across all disciplines; it just takes more creativity and front-end labor on the teacher's part.

When I've talked to my students about Chat GPT and whether they would use it, most of them said they wouldn't. I take this with a grain of salt because I am a teacher and there is a power dynamic there that is difficult to cross--they wouldn't want to say anything that would make me suspicious of them. But when I asked it in a more hypothetical way, like "What is a hypothetical situation in which you would use Chat GPT?" most of them said they would use it if they ran out of time, if they didn't care about the assignment, or if they were just lazy. Here's the thing--really lazy students won't put in a lot of effort anyways, so that category doesn't matter as much. But one way you can work around the idea of students running out of time is by giving them more time to do assignments and enforcing check-ins like different phases of draft work. Part of teaching writing well is giving students opportunities to learn and practice time management, which is a very difficult skill. And one way you can work around students not caring is by either giving more engaged, personal, and localized prompts or by having students create their own prompts. There is a lot of research in literacy studies that shows that giving students choices improves their engagement.

I'm really starting to treasure and embrace this process as I become a more experienced writer. It's not necessarily pre-writing or brainstorming; it's like burn writing. Writing that I burn to get to the writing that sets me on fire.