Tara Al-Hadithy
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
This activity invites students in a ‘Writing for University and Beyond’ undergraduate-level writing course to critically analyze and reflect on generative AI use while fostering rhetorical awareness. Students revisit their already written “My Writing Story” essay through the lens of rhetorical moves and compare their writing to an AI-generated literacy narrative. Students use the Jacobson, Pawlowski, and Tardy’s rhetorical moves framework to annotate both texts to identify the differences in how rhetorical moves are realized, focusing especially on embodied memory where writing is connected to lived experience and emotional response. Students identify what AI keeps, alters, or silences, in relation to voice, identity, emotional nuance, and rhetorical moves and strategies. As a personal narrative genre, the Writing Story essay provides an ideal site for questioning AI’s rhetorical capacity, for current research (e.g., Al-Hosni; Robbins and Blundell) shows that generative AI models often homogenize writing by flattening identity, standardizing stylistic variation, and erasing culturally specific expression. When students critically analyze how their own voice differs from AI’s patterned output, they develop rhetorical agency, deepen their awareness of genre conventions, and critically analyze how rhetorical choices shape meaning.