Leon Furze

This is the first post in a series exploring how multimodal generative AI (genAI) writing tools can be applied to all stages of the writing cycle, from purpose through to publication. The six stages of the writing cycle, taken from the book Practical Writing Strategies co-authored by myself and Benjamin White, encourage writers to explore the craft of writing through high-quality mentor texts and lots of practice. In this series, I’ll explore how genAI can be used by writers to sharpen their ideas, develop skills, and edit their writing without simply handing over the skills of writing to the technology.

Overview of the Writing Cycle

In Practical Writing Strategies, we divided the writing cycle into six stages, acknowledging that any piece of writing moves back and forth through these stages, and some will cycle through more than once. Unlike other writing models, this isn’t a linear beginning-to-end process. We found breaking the cycle into these stages helps writers to identify strengths and weaknesses and know where to focus their energy. The six stages are:

1. Purpose
2. Exploration
3. Ideas
4. Skills
5. Collaboration
6. Publication

In this post, I’ll explore the first of those areas: purpose. The purpose, audience, and context of a piece of writing are just as important for ideas scribbled down in a notebook with an audience of one (yourself) or an online article written for an audience of millions. These factors will determine many features of the final text, including style and voice, tone or mood, register or level of formality, word choice and vocabulary, level of detail and description, and use of plain or figurative language.

Purpose

We divide purpose into three overlapping areas: purpose, audience, and context. Many pieces of writing do not fit into a neat little box; creative writing can be just as compelling and persuasive as an argumentative essay, while persuasive speeches can give informed evidence like an expository or analytical response. Similarly, being able to adapt to a particular audience – whether that’s a single person, a group, or an entire population – will have a significant impact on the success of the writing. Media publications often include demographic information on their readers in their style guides, helping writers understand the nuances of their target audience.

Context plays a crucial role too; when, where, and in what format the publication appears will significantly impact the final piece, especially regarding form, structure, length, register, and even accessibility considerations (print vs digital). When combining these three areas of purpose, audience, and context in the preliminary planning stages, writers can save a lot of time in the editing phase. However, it’s essential not to become too rigid in these early stages, as purposes, audiences, and contexts can evolve and shift over time. Writers may start with one purpose in mind and later adapt the writing for another purpose.

As writers grow in confidence and maturity, they often develop a closer connection with their intended audience, causing these considerations to fade into the background. With this foundation established, let’s get into the first area of the writing cycle: Purpose.

Practical AI Strategies includes an entire section on GenAI policy and assessment. It is available from Amba Press

Purpose

Purpose is defined differently in English and writing curricula over the world, but broadly speaking we’re talking about texts in terms of whether they’re intended to inform, explain, describe, or entertain. Sometimes, these are defined as imaginative/creative, persuasive/argumentative, or analytical/expository purposes. Like the VCE English curriculum for secondary Australian students in Victoria, we also include “hybrid” purposes, acknowledging that most writing has more than one clear-cut purpose.

Audience

Being able to adapt your text to your particular audience, whether that’s a single person you have in mind, a group, or an entire population, will have a tremendous impact. The same piece written for an audience of teenagers, such as a blog post about the climate strikes, would be very different in style to that same article written for an audience of politicians or small businesses. To help writers understand this, media publications include demographic information about their readers in their style guides, perhaps providing archetypal readers of the publication or requirements for things like reading age, complexity, and sentence syntax.

Context

Finally, context: when, where, and in what format the publication is presented has an impact on the final product, especially in terms of form, structure, length, and register. Most articles written for an online context are formatted with more whitespace for readability and incorporate multimodal features, including embedding images and videos, and links to other relevant sites. A publication designed for print, such as in a community newsletter, will contain very different content and follow different stylistic conventions than a full page advert printed in a newspaper like The Times or The Age. Context will also inform some of the practical considerations of the text, whether it will be printed or displayed on the screen, in colour or black and white, accessible through voice readers, and so on.

Activities

Activity 1: Understanding Purpose

Objective: To help students understand how the purpose of writing influences its form, style, and content.

Steps:

1. Introduce the concept of writing purpose and its impact on writing style, voice, tone, register, and content.
2. Provide students with the following prompt to use with a generative AI tool (like Microsoft CoPilot, GPT, or Google):

Help the user to understand the impact of purpose on a final piece of writing. The user will enter a topic on any issue, and you will generate imaginative, expository, persuasive, and two hybrid examples of writing for that topic, each with a different purpose. For each piece of writing, suggest how the purpose affects the style, voice, tone, register, level of detail, and content of the final piece of writing. The topic must remain the same throughout to demonstrate how purpose changes the final piece of writing. Begin by prompting the user for a topic.

3. Ask students to enter a topic of their choice into the AI tool and analyse the generated examples.
4. Facilitate a discussion on how the purpose influenced each example’s writing aspects.

Here’s an example of the output from Microsoft Copilot:

Activity 2: Building an Audience Profile

Objective: To develop a detailed understanding of a specific audience for which a piece of writing is intended. (NOTE: This activity deliberately encourages the model to produce stereotypes – something which AI is unfortunately too good at. Experiment with different models to also compare the guardrails and filters.)

Steps:

1. Explain the importance of audience in writing and how it influences writing decisions.
2. Assign students to use generative AI to create detailed (but deliberately archetypal/stereotypical) audience profiles. The activity can be conducted in two ways:
   • Students prompt the AI model for information about a specific audience
   OR
   • The AI model asks students questions to help them develop the audience profile.
   Use the following structure for the AI interaction:

We are generating an audience profile. Answer questions about the audience on the issue of [topic], providing a detailed description of a typical audience member for this topic. Then, suggest how this knowledge of the audience should inform the writing, such as style, voice, tone, register, level of detail, and structure.

3. For another approach, encourage students to generate an image of their audience member using AI image generation tools.
4. Discuss how the developed audience profiles could influence their writing projects.

Here’s the example, using the topic “Generative AI’s impact on the workforce” (click to expand):

Activity 3: Exploring Context

Objective: To explore how changing the context of a piece of writing affects its presentation and reception.

Steps:

1. Brief students on the role of context in writing, including the “when,” “where,” and “in what format” a piece is published.
2. Provide students with an original excerpt of a text and the following prompt:

Take this extract of text about <topic> from <when/where published> and rewrite it for a totally different context. Identify the new context, then ask yourself five questions about the difference between the first and second extract. After answering these questions, provide a summary of the impact of context on the final piece of writing. <copy/paste excerpt>

3. Have students discuss the original and recontextualised texts, sharing their insights on how context influenced the writing.

Here’s how it looks with an extract of an article from The Conversation (published December 2023, online article):

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Activity 4: The Roadmap

Objective: To help students set specific, achievable goals for their writing projects, enhancing focus and motivation through the creation of a roadmap. (NB: This activity is directly adapted from Practical Writing Strategies to demonstrate how GenAI can be added to an existing task.)

Steps:

1. Identify the Project:
   • Begin with a reflection exercise where students identify the writing project they are currently undertaking. This could be an essay, an oral presentation, or a creative/personal response.
2. Set Specific Goals:
   • Instruct students to brainstorm specific, achievable goals for their project. Encourage them to think beyond general aims like “get a high mark” to more tangible objectives such as “write 200 words by the end of this lesson”.
   • Encourage the creation of a to-do list with clear goals, for example:
     [ ] Write 200 words by the end of this lesson [ ] Complete a first draft by the end of the week
     [ ] Revise the first draft by next Tuesday
3. Document Goals:
   • Have students write down their goals on a piece of paper or digitally. Encourage them to keep this list accessible during their writing sessions to serve as a roadmap. This visibility allows them to check off completed tasks, providing a sense of accomplishment.
4. Incorporate Generative AI:
   • Introduce an AI activity where students use a genAI model to create additional possible goals related to their project. Provide them with a prompt to input into the AI tool, such as:

Given a <type of writing project>, generate a list of specific, achievable goals that could guide a student in completing this project. Include a variety of milestones related to planning, drafting, revising, and editing.

Conclusion

Throughout this series of posts, the emphasis will be on using AI as a tool to support student writing, not replace it. Generative AI can be used to support students in developing their own understanding of the nuances of purpose, audience and context.

Treating aspects of the writing like the imaginative, persuasive, or argumentative purpose as “variables” allows students to quickly see the impact of purpose on features like style and voice. GenAI can also be used to quickly generate audience profiles for target readers and demographics, and to recontextualise existing writing as a way to explore the impact of context on structure and form.

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