Chad Lewis and Jackson W. Martin
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
The writing classroom is an opportune space to teach students how to critically think about generative AI (GenAI) outputs and their limitations. This assignment asks students to compare the rhetorical situations of scholarly research articles in the natural sciences with their popular science counterparts. The catch is that students will use GenAI to adapt the scholarly article while imitating the rhetorical style of a popular science publication, such as ScienceDaily or Inside Hook. Students will write an analytical essay that compares and contrasts the rhetorical situations of academic research and popular media while simultaneously experimenting with GenAI prompt engineering, learning about the features of AI generated prose, and identifying AI hallucinations and misinterpretations of the scholarly source material.