Dive Brief:
- When helping high school students build skills for writing strong college essays and other high-stakes personal statements like scholarship applications, cover letters and resumes, personal attention and encouragement are key, educators say.
- Students need to develop skills to talk about their experiences, put them into perspective and think about their contributions, which has always been a challenging assignment but is even more so given artificial intelligence, said Kate Vieira, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education. “The use of generative AI is kind of threatening the ‘personal’ in the personal essay,” she said.
- Karoline Trepper, clinical assistant professor of English education at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, agrees that AI is having an impact and said it’s key to consider giving students multiple writing opportunities in class to ensure they’re developing their voice and not relying on AI to do so.
Dive Insight:
Teachers need to give students space to take a deep dive into their experiences, then ask follow-up questions to draw out details, Vieira said.
“There are things you only remember in the process of writing and talking about it with other people,” she said. “One of the things that generative AI really threatens is something that’s so essential to developing skills as a writer: being able to sit in discomfort, to face the blank page and not know how it’s going to turn out. To sit with a bad draft and have to think about how to make it better.”
Writing is a heavy cognitive activity, Vieira said.
“We talk about the importance of developing student writers as intentional and informed decision-makers,” she said. “How they want to represent themselves, thinking about their audience — all of this is intensive and takes time to develop.”
On the employment side, concern about AI use in resumes and cover letters has prompted businesses to require on-the-spot written tasks during a job interview, Vieira said. “Being able to be in conversation with your own brain is really important,” she said. “Critical thinking, and communicating to an audience, using the correct tone … those are built into writing. That takes time to develop. It takes maturity to develop.”
When she’s reading personal essays for admissions to a graduate program, Vieira said she considers not only what the person has done, but how they think about it and how they want to build on it. “When you’re writing about experiences, you have to be able to put that in a communal perspective,” she said.
Low-stakes, frequent, ungraded, in-class writing assignments can help students build habits of mind and practice, Vieira said, along with the opportunity to share that writing with interested readers — typically peers rather than the teacher.
“Students are often writing to a teacher who, by definition, knows more than they do,” she said. “That’s not very empowering.”
Trepper suggested a method called contrasting cases, where rather than telling students “here’s what you need to include” in an assignment, educators give multiple examples of how different writers use their style and substance.
“Can you rank them from most effective to least effective, from most compelling narrative voice to least compelling voice?” she said. ‘What is it about that piece that makes it more or less effective for you?”
With cover letters, teachers can present several examples and ask students, “Who would you interview first?” Trepper said. With a personal essay, the question would be, “If you were sitting on a hiring or admissions committee, who would be the most compelling?”
She added, “Students having a chance to do that themselves before writing their own is very helpful.”
Once they do write their own piece, teachers need to provide in-class opportunities for actionable feedback that students can infuse.
“I’ve seen teachers include a line in their rubric about incorporating feedback into the revision,” she said. “In order for teachers to do that, they need to provide the space and time. That develops students’ confidence. Students feel as if they can write something, and it’s OK if it’s not perfect.”
