Since the pandemic, I have always been curious about the combination of technology in the classroom and how it can help students. As an educator in the K12 system, I have seen the benefits of grammar editing, spelling corrections, and translation tools for my English Language Learners (ELLs) while I am speaking with complex academic terms. As an educator, I enjoy the creativity of using it, the opportunity to provide an education to those who are not physically able to be in the classroom, let alone the same country, and differentiate with it based on students' needs. 

With this in mind, after being at UCF for the last three years, writing became a slap to the face! What do I mean? The power of writing in all fields is something I never quite saw as free flowing, structured, without borders, meaningful, and ever-expanding. I grew into my love of writing all over again. Yet, given the heavy dichotomous processing of my brainial function, I decided to merge the tool of Aritificial Intelligence technnology and writing. How does one affect the other? It is like asking about the chicken or the egg? Since writing has been present for thousands of years and humans are the ones to create technology, I did a flip. For this programming, I wanted to bring into focus the following question:

What is the effect of AI on writing in the last 3 years in rhetoric and composition?

Out of the many articles read in class, the one that resonated with me in its practical sense for using technological visuals for mapping was Mueller's Network Sense: Methods for Visualizing a Discipline, which focuses on trends and patterns in large networks and how to produce them through visuals that allow for a bird's eye view of a discipline over time or within a publication. The complexity of the focus question of this mini study is complex based on the definitions of the field reflecting global turns within societies and cultures. Mueller (2017) focuses on three turns that affected patterns of disciplinary aspects within the field at three major turns: linguistic turns (language as organizing theory of knowledge) (p.71), social turns ("locates fundamental interdependencies between writing and the junctures of human sociality and materiality..." (p.71)), and process turns (acknowledges as "situational and idiosyncratic" the abnormal spread of any work's evolution within time (p.71)). Integrating technologies that take in large research within rhetoric and writing can be placed in programs, by using their citations, to capture large networks, and then ciphered further through programs such as word clouds, semantic workouts, and other technologies that will help visualize these small and emergent turns to help us predict changes in the field.  

Therefore, technology has a predicting role in helping the field be proactive rather than reactive in its direction and how it will change based on emergent turns. The first turn took place in my own head! I became curious about the predictory relationship between AI and writing. The next turn took place through my practical observations in the classrooms and how/when my students would use it to work with their writing. For extended essays and academic writing, they would use it frequently. For creative works, they depended more on their own voice and knowledge. They added multimodal aspects to their work in this style of writing. For writing that came from a deep-rooted and personal place, they used heavy imagery, colors, and juxtaposition of multimodal design aspects to their work.

AI is becoming prominent and more sophisticated as the years go by. Classrooms, at all grade levels, are incorporating much of use of AI technology with the challenge of ethical implications being argumented presently.  Because the questions uses a technology (AI) that comes in varied forms, with unique algorithmic functions, and specified uses, I needed a forum that focused on conversations on the production and design of technology for communication and another one that centralized in writing pedagogies.

To find the possible effects of AI on writing, each forum’s journal was used to find patterns of the evolution of writing because of emergent AI technology in the last 3 years. For ATTW, I used the Taylor & Francis Online publication site, which allows for mass searches of articles and other publication types within the forum’s Technical Communication Quarterly journal from 2023 to 2021. For SigDoc, the publications in their Communication Quarterly journal volumes from 2023 to 2021 were used with a search in writing and AI technology as a focus.

Next, to find combined patterns and trends of the AI uses in writing, all journal issues within both forums will be combined using Flourish.studio animated chart generator tool, a series of word clouds from Google Word Cloud Generator, and ExCel charts. The data is aimed at answering the following follow up questions: