Academic Integrity Week Workshop | How to Become a More Confident Writer
How to Become a More Confident Writer
Why “Academic Integrity,”
For whom, And so what?
Academic Integrity Week Workshop
Agenda
● Definitions and purpose of “integrity” in academic writing
● Framing writing as a practice and a process
● Recognizing and developing our own voices and style
● Using AI and other supplemental technologies
● Specific takeaways, practices, and next steps
I’d like to remove us from the framework of academic integrity being something that we engage in defensively —that is, something we do to avoid a negative outcome (say, getting caught and receiving a failing grade) and re -insert academic integrity into something that we engage in proactively to encourage a positive outcome.
Some of these positive outcomes (just for ourselves) include:
● Increased learning & retention
● Confidence and ability to articulate meaningful concepts
● Development and awareness of our own voice and style
Disconnecting “Integrity” from “Morality”
● Working definition or practice of integrity:
○ “Engaging in something that you feel comfortable owning; that is, because of your relationship to the production or work, you would be comfortably able to explain the process, decision-making, and rationale behind.”
● What is the value of practicing integrity apart from trying to be morally just?
● Are you worried about “having integrity” in your daily conversations or exchanges with your friends or family? Why or why not?
Activity 1: “Talk” as a signifier of style
Practice talking through something basic about yourself (a favorite memory or a story you tell about yourself), or describe an object in your own voice (how would you describe it to someone who couldn’t see it? Why is it important?)
Other group members: listen and write down notes to identify “how they talk.” If you were writing a description of this person talking in a novel or screenplay, what words might you use?
Activity 2: Identifying our own style
Pull out something informal you’ve written recently – a text message or something you wrote for your own personal context and not as a work or school requirement.
Using our conversation so far, identify where you see your own writing conventions or decisions in this example.
Activity Takeaways
● The things your peers observed about you, and the things you observed about yourself in speaking and/or writing… these things are specific ways that you already practice integrity in your communication.
● By being aware of our own styles and voices, we can intentionally use those stylistic choices in ways that make our writing more authentic and unique, while also being persuasive, engaging, and ethical.
Stylistic choices are everywhere
What slang do you use? What does it mean?
Practice identifying a piece of slang or informal speech that you practice in daily life but would not tend to do in academic writing. What is your academic or professional writing MISSING that exists in your casual writing? How can your academic or professional writing benefit from that?
Spellcheck, etc. and the collapse of style
● These are all examples of autocorrect making suggestions that I disagreed with and did not choose to use
Developing your voice
Practice voice to text transcription and begin by just talking through your topic as you would in a conversation and then go back and format what you have. Use that as your starting point.
Imagine a specific audience. Change that audience sometimes when you write. If you imagine an old professor or teacher looking over your shoulder as you write, what kinds of suggestions are they giving you?
Using ChatGPT and other tools
It would be nice if studies are showing us that humans are innately good at recognizing AI art vs. human-produced work. Train an algorithm on a large data set of any individual thing and it will be able to create fairly convincing artificial variations on that thing.
This is consistently not the case, though. Ask AI to produce a poem “in the style of” a given author (Emily Dickinson) and even people with expert degrees in the field are barely better than random at identifying the outlier.
QUESTION: Does this fact diminish the work of Emily Dickinson? Is her work made less engaging or passionate because of this fact? Why not?
Timing Matters
If you want to choose to use AI to help you produce your writing, whatever form it takes, consider doing it once you already have:
● extensively practiced writing on your own,
● received feedback on that writing,
● have at least some sense of how to recognize what makes a piece of writing in your field effective at accomplishing its purpose.
● Offload the parts of the process where stylistic choices don’t matter (which are fewer than you might think)
Creation Matters
Shift from thinking of AI as a creator and instead as an aggregator:
Choose to use AI in ways that help you create your own writing, not in ways that create the writing for you:
● Using AI to help you understand the expectations of the genre you’re writing in (what an essay or a lit review looks like, for example)
● Using AI to give you commentary, feedback, alternative suggestions or directions, or response questions to something you write
● “What kinds of questions would [specific type of person] in [specific type of context] ask about…?”
1. What you know you know a. The things you know about rocket science (i.e., that it exists, that it involves propulsion, lift, apogee is a word)
2. What you know you don’t know a. What calculations are necessary for making rocket go up – but there are calculations!
3. What you don’t know that you don’t know a. Specific ongoing questions in the field of rocket science in 2025 …using AI is an inherent decision to offload your knowledge-confidence in this realm, this is the thing you are rolling the dice on
Fig. G: the Zone of Proximal Development
Something to try:
Ask ChatGPT to write a short description or summary of something (anything) that you know quite well, and then you practice evaluating it.
Try to describe (for yourself) the difference between what ChatGPT has produced and your own expertise in this area.
Practicing Integrity : noticing ways in which the knowledge generated from ChatGPT is specifically distinct from your own. What would happen if you had to defend or justify the output on your own?
Shifts in how student work is evaluated
● Valuing “authenticity” (meaning: personal context and stylistic choices) in student work is quickly becoming more important to instructors and people who study grading and assessment
● As AI becomes more ubiquitous, it will get easier and easier to produce “generic” work, but more challenging to produce original, even if MESSY, work.
Use of random generation or procedural content
● Take two random passages or quotations from the texts you’re working with and decide to build an analysis/discussion around them together.
● Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies , Random Word Generator, Coolors
○ Insert a component of randomness into your work as a way to shield yourself from creating the same kind of thing that AI would create
● Use references from your favorite authors or artists: find something you like, ask yourself why , and then practice making something in a similar style. In art, using references is not only not cheating, it is largely considered essential!
● D20 generative writing exercise– try making your own using writing strategies that have worked well for you
Things to do or consider doing
● Opt-out of AI data usage on Canvas
● Ask your professors to talk with you individually about their practices around evaluating writing, as well as asking them about their own writing and research processes.
● Seek out help before something is a crisis
● Share and collaborate in ways that don’t feel like work – develop your ideas in conversation with others to build integrity
● Use voice-to-text as a way of writing first drafts
● Use explicit prompts with ChatGPT “I do not want you to write the actual text, but instead examples and suggestions for…” etc.
