ENGL 339 Blog Post 4: Bedford Ch. 3 & Cloghessy's Essay

     Chapter 3 of the Bedford Guide discusses tutoring throughout the different stages of the writing process. The chapter emphasizes that writing is not a linear process, meaning that ideas and refinements can happen at any point. There are 3 stages of the writing process, the first being the prewriting stage. This stage involves invention and planning–thinking about things like audience, organization, and generating ideas. You may help the writer during this process by suggesting things like Brainstorming (listing), freewriting, or clustering. The second stage is drafting. Once writers have generated sufficient ideas to get started, you can help them organize those ideas and plan to write. The final stage is the revision stage. Global revisions refer to the paper’s overall development and organization, while sentence-level revision is about fixing individual sentences. 

     Cloghessy’s essay details her experiments with using ChatGPT to generate writing center session notes from transcripts. Session notes are a very useful tool for writers and can be tedious and draining to produce. She develops a prompt workflow and incorporates archival notes so the AI emulates her style and while AI produces a usable first draft quickly, tutors still revise feedback and personalize tone. Cloghessy argues that AI can increase efficiency, help produce more detailed notes, but she still has concerns about the ethics, privacy, and voice of AI. 

     I really enjoyed reading about the prewriting stage in the Bedford Guide. There are a lot of strategies and techniques for organizing ideas that I didn’t know about. Freewriting is my favorite one, because doing a brain dump is a great way to actualize all of the jumbled thoughts in your head. Cloghessy’s AI essay was an interesting read as well. My main takeaway from the article is that AI puts out what you put in. So the more specific and all encompassing you are with your prompts, the better the response will be. 

     Based on the readings, I feel like I’ve changed my tune about making the brainstorming/prewriting process more “efficient” by using AI. Do we think that ideas have a better chance at being fully fleshed out when using AI? Should efficiency be a top priority during the writing/tutoring process?