Task & Audience:
Imagine that you are a writer working for OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT. Your job is to assess how well ChatGPT follows instructions given it and how effectively it writes. In order to do this assessment, you will give ChatGPT a prompt and then analyze its response. Your assessment—your essay—will analyze the rhetoric of ChatGPT. Rhetoric refers to the ways that a text attempts to accomplish its purpose in its rhetorical situation (that’s the subject, occasion, audience, purpose, and speaker).
Process:
Choose a controversial topic on which you have a strong opinion. This can be pretty much anything that you care about, have some expertise on, and about which people have strong contrasting opinions. You could choose whether your favorite sportsball player is better than another sportsball player; whether Taylor Swift’s original recordings are better than the recently re-recorded ones; whether a hot dog is a sandwich; or something more serious, like whether Congress should pass a bill to forgive all student loan debt or whether humans should build colonies on Mars.
Consider the rhetorical situation. Your speaker and purpose are already determined: YOU are the speaker, and your purpose is to persuade someone to your side. ChatGPT is not the speaker, even though it is writing the text. It is writing the text for YOU to use. The subject is whatever you chose as your topic in Step 1. But you should also think about who you will try to persuade. Is it a specific person (your mom?) or a group of people (New England Patriots fans?). What is an occasion that might lead you to try to persuade this audience (Thanksgiving dinner? The World Cup? A discussion at brunch? An argument while playing a videogame together?).
If you don’t already have one, create a free OpenAILinks to an external site. account so that you can use ChatGPT.
Tell ChatGPT to create whatever text you have decided you need based on steps 1 and 2. Include whatever information you think would be helpful or necessary for ChatGPT to be persuasive. For example, you might instruct it: “Give me a script for how to persuade my Mom that I should be allowed to get a new puppy at Thanksgiving dinner. Include information on the value of pet ownership for teenagers.” You may have to give multiple sets of directions in order to get a final text from ChatGPT that satisfies what you want. Aim for ChatGPT to produce a text that’s at least 500 words long. THE TEXT CHATGPT PRODUCES IS WHAT YOU WILL ANALYZE IN YOUR ESSAY.
Read the text produced by ChatGPT and consider how well it accomplishes your purpose. Pay attention to what the text does well and what it fails at, particularly focusing on the means of appeal: ethos, pathos, and logos.
Do some pre-writing activities (outlining, brainstorming, idea mapping) to get your juices flowing.
Draft an essay with an introduction; a paragraph each on ethos, pathos, and logos; and a conclusion.
Revise, edit, and proofread your essay.
Submit!
Minimum requirements of your essay:
Have at least 5 paragraphs
Be at least 2 pages long (to the bottom of page 2), when in correct MLA format, excluding quotations longer than one sentence, and excluding the works cited page.
Have a works cited page
Course Outcomes this essay helps you accomplish:
Students will write essays controlled by a thesis and featuring appropriate introductions and conclusions
Students will write essays that demonstrate various purposes and organizational methods
Students will demonstrate competence in grammar, spelling, and punctuation
Students will demonstrate their ability to plan, organize, and revise their writing
Students will analyze, evaluate, and apply the ideas found in a variety of texts
Students will summarize, paraphrase, and quote source material and correctly integrate this material into their own original writing
Students will present their essays and document their source material in accordance with Modern Language Association and/or American Psychological Association style.
