Short Analysis Paper

This essay will let you use AI in a manner that many faculty reject. Using AI to write a comparative essay FOR you means C work or lower, given my standards; the writing might LOOK good and be correct, but the depth of analysis rarely suffices.

Instead, you'll use AI to help generate some ideas, review a draft using my rubrics for good writing, and assess your final draft before I do. Details to follow! Here's what I have for now.

Why do I do it this way? My mantra from my forthcoming (I hope) book on AI & Writing: "If you want a job after graduation, you need to add value to AI-created content. This assigment helps you pratice that art of human intangibility.

Topic

ID a concept about aliens or monsters that you did not consider before taking the course. Use first person where appropriate (I encourage that!) and draw upon two stories. Not one, and three would be pushing it for a short essay that goes deep.
Without summarizing what we both read, discuss how the author's use of imagery, plot details, vocabulary, story-arc, dialogue, or other techniques of fiction helped you to understand this idea. In your conclusion, don't sum up what you said already, but tell your readers why that new concept matters beyond your own reading.

Example

In college I never thought about how grotesque we, as a species, might appear physically or morally to a different race of sentient creatures. More than one of our stories mentions this idea in detail. So what? In my conclusion, I might talk about how SF stories (as with AI) can be predictive and even helpful when such matters cross over into reality. How would we humans deal with a First Contact, if the other party was repulsed by us?

Format

at least 1000 words and not more than 2500 words. MLA citation (author). See more on that here.
Submitted to our Draft Exchange for peer work, as a Google or Word Doc
Final draft submitted to me via e-mail. Don't be late. See policies page for consequences.

AI Guidelines & Prompts

Here are a list of AIs I have used with my "Writing With And About AI" course to guide your choices. I strongly recommend trying out two different AIs for this.
1. At the top of your draft, note the name and version of the AI(s) you used, if any. I will not grade the paper until these are included. I really dislike the lazy-UR-student habit of not including their names. Do it.
2. Upload your draft to the AI (some will accept the file while others you'll need to cut and paste).
3. Copy the rubric below and begin with this prompt: "Dr. Essid's rubric follows. Please assess how I did, using these guidelines."
4. You may need to copy/paste the Pet Peeves into the AI, if it cannot read links.
5. You also may need to copy/paste in the two stories you use.
6. I'd enjoy reading the AI feedback. You can e-mail it to me or put in a page break and copy it after your draft. I don't use AI to grade your work (a growing professor habit of which I disapprove). With some drafts and for final ones after I grade, I sometimes give Grammarly's assessment.

Rubric for grading: Analysis Essay

A Good Title: Begin there. Do you have a title that captures your focus? You can use it (and change it as you write) to be sure you stay focused. Here are some ways to use titles effectively. UR students are TERRIBLE at this! It's easy. Try it.

Governing Claim (aka "Thesis"): all our work is analytical, so without a governing claim, the essay would lose 40% or more. Usually more, since the lack of a governing claim leads to a cascading failure of digressions and contradictions.

A "Why it Matters" Conclusion: If your conclusion merely restates what you already said, it's boring. While you can briefly do so, the thrust of the final paragraph should discuss why the issue you analyze matters beyond this class. Is there some lesson YOU learned? For instance, Terry Bisson's "They're Made Out of Meat" demonstrates how many of us react when facing others who are radically different when we travel to a new place. We might be disgusted, for instance, to see a bullfight in Madrid or encounter public nudity on a Greek beach.

Roughly equal treatment of each source: don't skimp and don't confine the answer to the first page or two of each story (or book). Those typify lazy or last-minute work.

Strong or weak claims: each weak but supportable claim might lose an essay 5-10%; a sweeping generalization or unsupportable claim 20%.

Accuracy with sources: Misrepresenting a source would cost an essay 20-25%; forgetting a key incident or character would cost an essay 5-10%. Failing to cite correctly the pages from our adopted edition of a book costs you 5 points.

AI hallucinations: mean you have to redo the work and lose any chance at an A grade. A hallucination usually that means you copy/paste from AI and it says something that did not occur in our reading.

Too much summary: at least 25% penalty if you tell me what we have both already read instead of making your own claims and supporting them with just enough evidence.

Pet Peeves: for sentence-level errors and sloppiness, the penalty depends upon frequency. The essay loses a point or two, usually. Bigger "pet peeve" can cost you a quarter to half your grade. Here's my handbook on Pet Peeves for college faculty. I'll get a text-file version you can use to train your AI.

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