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AI writers like ChatGPT can often produce work that is, at least on first glance, indistinguishable from human writing. With a simple prompt like "write an expository essay on symbolism in Heart of Darkness," ChatGPT can spit out an organized, coherent, five-paragraph essay in seconds. (See results below.) And no two essays will be identical. In some cases, help from an AI may be as acceptable as using a Google search as part of the research process. But in many cases, it will be unacceptable for classroom work. So how do teachers deal with the growing ease with which AIs can complete student homework? Turnitin, which is known for its technology used for plagiarism detection, has posted a technology preview that shows its software automatically detecting work written by an AI writer, even going so far as to show which parts of an essay were written by AI versus human and indicate where AI writing transitions into human writing.

This NYT article reports findings of a recently released study, which concluded that computers are capable of scoring essays on standardized tests as well, or possibly better, than humans. However, Les Perelman, a director of writing at MIT and a tester of the Educational Testing Services E-Rater program disagrees, arguing that the system can be easily "gamed".

This site gives examples about the process to go through in writing a college essay.

Although this is on a Santa Ana College website it still gives you a great idea on how colleges want you to write your essays.

Ruth Starkman, of Stanford University, examines the five 2013 Common Application Essay prompts, and offers some sage suggestions to jumpstart your writing process.

Mark Montgomery, of Montgomery Educational Consulting, examines the 2013-2014 Common Application Essay Prompts, and succinctly analyzes each prompt in turn, noting some key elements that should be present in a strong response.

"The findings are necessarily limited, but do suggest that retrieval practice, as the essay-writing was called, is a powerful learning tool."

I thought this article was great because it added onto the other previous articles posted onto Diigo. It gave me even more tips on how to write my College Essay. 1. Write as you speak. 2. Be original. 3. Show genuine enthusiasm. 4. Create some mystery. 5. Focus. 6. Use active verbs. 7. Use short sentences and simple words.

This is about how text messaging has been affecting a student's way of writing in the classroom.

Slang and other text-talk terms have been making their way into student's academic essays and even their college essays. Students have stopped capitalizing words and stopped using punctuation altogether. While the future is unclear, it may be possible for academic writings to learn to accept this new way of writing.

Edge is a phenomenal science writing website with lots of fascinating 1-page essays that are good models of lively science writing.

Essay/study by Deborah Tannen: "So the key to why having sisters makes people happier - men as well as women - may lie not in the kind of talk they exchange but in the fact of talk. If men, like women, talk more often to their sisters than to their brothers, that could explain why sisters make them happier." See also discussion on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2739 (they advise us to be wary of overstating the significance of the results)

"The Harry Potter books," writes Jessy Randall in this essay from VERBATIM, "are not just good literature but a treasury of wordplay and invention," and we couldn't agree more.

contains links to two scholarly essays, including how the tool was developed and used

"People who use unnecessarily complicated language in their writing are perceived as less competent and confident than those who used simpler language". In recent studies, researchers have found that "the authors of the essays with complicated language were rated lower than the authors of the essays with simpler language".

This articles talks about how social media has affected the way college students communicate with one another. What I found interesting was the statistics they found in the college students with 39% of the people who took the survey feeling closer to their friends because of social media, and 26% saying that they have more friends because of it. It was surprising to see the positive effect that social media had on people rather than all the negative affects it has.

This essay looks at the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is that that the structure of a language determines a native speaker's perception and categorization of experience. This essay looks at how emotional differences in language are tied to the grammar and mechanics and they can't be shared borrowed across languages

This essay compares the controversies surrounding actions taken by two school boards-one in Hawai'i and the other in Oakland-in their attempts to help students in their districts attain fluency in standard English. Public reactions expressed during each of these two incidents demonstrated a general lack of understanding about languages and nonstandard dialects. The myths and characterizations about Hawai'i Creole English and African American Vernacular English, and the issues these two stigmatized dialects have raised, point to educational policy implications concerning academic achievement and the politics of language.

This is a really useful essay in highlighting linguistic research re: how to effectively instruct speakers of non-standard varieties of English, e.g. AAVE and HCE. Nice find!