In Pursuit of Feedback — Any Feedback
In starting down the path to making my writing more genuinely intelligent via artificial means, I initially thought I’d explore Revision Assistant since our school already subscribes to Turnitin.com. I thought they’d be linked or packaged to be accessible from a single account, consolidated services.
Wrong.
I needed to make a separate account for Revision Assistant. For these purposes, a trial account. After submitting a trial account request, I waited for 24 hours to hear back from Revision Assistant on my free trial account. When I did, I was not able to access it by following the guidelines. I sent a help email and moved on to NoRedInk.
NoRedInk has a free and premium version available. Even the free version was entrancing. I stared in awe at the myriad of opportunities for improving my Parts of Speech, Capitalization and Punctuation, Sentences, Phrases, and Clauses, Commonly Confused Words, Parts of an Essay, plus more, more, more — all for free! What I couldn’t find, was an option to openly submit a piece of writing for a quick, general once over. I moved on but made a note to make NoRedInk a place for exploration on my return voyage.
Finally, I found a place that would accept my work on Write Lab/Easy Bib/Chegg…? Thankful also that I had actually written something this summer — even though it was a two-page letter to the Idaho Transportation Department — I copied the text, pasted it into the box, and clicked “Check my paper.”
It was painless. And…gainless.
I informed me that I had misspelled ‘traveller’ (have always had a tough time with double consonants), that I should have used hyphens between one-year-old (noted) and that I had two instances of passive voice (suggestions that would actually create errors in the meaning of the language used, much like the author of “Humans Still Win” experienced).
That was it, at least for free. “…to see all 24 writing suggestions…” I’d have to upgrade.
My takeaway is pretty simple: the experience I ended up having with the actual robot feedback was simple at best. Telling a student he or she has misspelled ‘traveler’, needs to hyphenate one-year-old, and is using passive voice in a manner that he/she must do so to preserve meaning, is not the feedback I give, nor do I want to start giving it. Yet, at least in terms of the misspelling and hyphens, I actually would have made these changes prior to “publishing” my writing. So, in that regard, edit away, free version of WriteLab.
Similarly to a point Blake Montgomery makes in the aforementioned article, my post-experiment perspective is to consider how writing assistance technologies can provide feedback when teachers won’t have the time to do so (I think some feedback vs. no feedback is a good thing) and/or how students can use the technologies to view feedback for which we are unwilling to use the time we do have.
As for my initial wow-factor with NoRedInk, I’m back on it exploring. With half the classroom time with students this year (hybrid schedule), would I be willing to sub-out practice with Parts of Speech, Capitalization and Punctuation, Sentences, Phrases, and Clauses, Commonly Confused Words, etc.? I’m hoping my school is willing to pay a premium to help me do so.
