Michelle Cook, Gaby Meindl, and Angela Laflen
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
Helping students develop rhetorical knowledge acts as a bridge between understanding GenAI tools on a functional level and being a critical reader of texts generated by AI. Because we are preparing students to enter academic and professional spaces that have been, and will continue to be, shaped by the development of GenAI, it is imperative that they build a diverse set of literacies to become informed, and not passive, users and observers of these tools. This assignment is a rhetorical analysis paper appropriate for use in a range of writing courses, from first-year composition to upperdivision English courses to writing intensive courses across the discipline. During a unit focused on rhetorical analysis, students are tasked with comparing and contrasting the rhetorical prowess of human-authored and AI-generated arguments. Through learning about rhetorical moves and using the rhetorical situation to prompt a GenAI chatbot, this unit culminates in a rhetorical analysis in which they develop a nuanced position on whether or not GenAI can create effective academic arguments and be relied upon as a credible source of information in research. This assignment can be adapted across many contexts and analyzing a wide variety of genres to use as comparison texts, depending on the type of institution and course learning outcomes.