Teaching Writing to Engineers and Scientists
in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Michael Alley
January 2025
January 2025
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way that we should teach writing to engineering and science students. This essay discusses major changes to that teaching.
1. As instructors, we should expect that many students will use AI on our assignments. As my own surveys have found, many engineering students are already using AI to help them write assignments. Just as I am fine with students using calculators to help them solve technical problems, I am fine with students using AI to help them write assignments. However, my acceptance of students using AI depends on the stage of the writing process in which AI is used. In general, the writing process consists of four stages: researching and planning, drafting, revising, and proofreading. I am fine with students using AI programs such as ChatGPT to correct grammatical errors, eliminate needless words, and strengthen connections between ideas. However, I certainly do not want students to use AI to do all four stages of the process because students will likely learn nothing about writing in the course. Moreover, I do not want students using AI to draft assignments in my writing courses. The main reason is that during the drafting process, engineers and scientists deepen their understanding of the technical content. As Francis Bacon said, writing makes a person more precise. 2. Writing assignments should be documents that AI cannot effectively draft. Artificial intelligence is effective at drafting a document with content for which much public knowledge exists. For that reason, gone are the days in which students select the topics and audiences of their writing assignments. If you allow students to do so for an assignment, you will be reading a lot of ChatGPT. For a number of years in my technical writing courses, I had engineering and science students select a topic to research for the semester. Students would write a proposal on why they should research that topic, do a presentation on that topic, and then write a final report on that topic. However, about ten years ago, I abandoned that strategy for another used at MIT and the University of Michigan. In this newer strategy, my writing assignments shadow assignments in a technical course. Now, all of my writing students are also enrolled in a junior-level design course, and the assignments they submit (an initial design report and a proposal) are the same assignments that they submit to the technical course. Because each student team has a unique design and because the content for the writing assignment arises from the process that each team uses to develop that design, artificial intelligence has difficulty capturing the technical precision and emphasis. Moreover, because the assignments have a combination of technical audiences with different levels of familiarity with the content, artificial intelligence has difficulty targeting those audiences (unless the students specify so in their prompts). 3. Writing assignments should deepen the student's understanding of the content during the drafting stage. Researchers often comment on how much they learn by writing a research paper or proposal. In such situations, although the researchers have ideas at the start of the writing process, the process itself (particularly the drafting stage) shapes and deepens the researcher's understanding of those ideas. Since the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022, I have worked with the design instructors to have the process of writing our initial design report and design proposal increase the students' technical understanding of the design process. |
Michael Alley is a teaching professor in the College of Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. The author of The Craft of Scientific Writing (Springer, 2018), he has taught writing courses and workshops to engineers and scientists at more than 100 universities, laboratories, agencies, and companies in sixteen countries spanning four continents. The images shown arise from writing workshops that he has taught. |