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| Learning how to write involves learning how form and content work together in a piece of writing. Below is an activity that is good for helping students analyze the relationship between form and content and has the added benefit of demonstrating some limitations and possibilities of using LLMs as a writing aid.
LLMs are very good at producing the formal aspects of a writing task. For example, they can reproduce the form of a college essay really well: introduction, thesis, and body paragraphs that contain topic sentences, evidence, and analysis, etc. However, they are not so good at producing appropriate content for the essay. For example, they will often force or stretch a piece of evidence to support the claims in an essay. Here’s an activity to teach these things. Use Notebook LM to output an essay that incorporates three sources. First, ask students to identify the formal elements in the essay, which will help them start to see those in their own writing. Then have them scrutinize and evaluate the content of those formal elements. They will need a lot of guidance, so provide some models and examples to get them started. You might put the essay into a Google Doc that you can annotate as a class. |