In this age of AI, colleagues and I discuss what it truly means to be a human creator. Whether artist or professor, novelist or teacher, or all of the above, wise people I know are ruminating on this topic.
When it comes to the college essay, I teach students takeaway skills that allow them to work with or without bots. The lifelong skills of Creation, Verification, and Editing.
Futurists and techno-optimists are saying (at the time of this writing) that the future with AI is in the hands of those who can prompt and edit the work of AI.
At the time of this writing, I strongly discourage using AI for your college essay (and here’s why). But however you interface with AI in your future work in college and beyond, I want to make sure the skills I teach you are ones you can use well beyond the time spent with me. And human authors must always have these creating, verifying, and editing skills.
Creation
- How to generate meaningful, unique, and memorable details. More on that here, in this “Show Don’t Tell” post I wrote for College Essay Guy.
- How to make a path and structure through those details that means something to you, the writer, as well as your reader. More on that here in these posts:
- How to identify, enhance, and amplify your writer’s voice
- How to own your work (and make a series of choices) throughout the creation process
Verification
- How to research a school’s details to make a great match with yours
- How to align your values with a school’s values
- How to fact check any assertions or data and whether to cite or credit within an essay
- How to stay academically honest within a college essay
Editing
- How to revise so that you remove extraneous generalizations and focus on the storytelling “gold”
- How to revise for flow
- How to Cut Down Words in a College Essay
- How to ensure your grammar and punctuation is on point
Contact me if you’d like to talk about how to be a better creator, verifier, and editor
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