ai essay editing

ai essay editing

The Benefits of AI Essay Editing

1. Introduction

It is a fact that artificial intelligence will take over the job market. In a few years, a fair number of professional jobs will be the responsibility of some form of automation, whether it be accounting, finance, law, or various other professions. With this news at hand, improving writing skills has never been more important. As white-collar professions are replaced by AI, the demand for skilled writers will be on the rise. Aside from job security, artificial intelligence may be the key in improving one’s writing skill over time. But what exactly is the job of an AI and how can it provide service to an individual looking to improve their writing? This essay will focus on the benefits of having AI as a tool for enhancing writing skills in terms of editing. Writing is an essential tool that is learned and experienced by a vast majority of people. As Davis and Simpson explain, “writing is both a process and a product.” Writing not only helps us to communicate and educate others, but it also helps us understand and organize our own ideas. Therefore, the ability to write effectively reflects a higher understanding of intelligence. Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processed by machines, especially computer systems. The process of simulating intelligence has taken on a variety of meanings over the years. At first, suggested by McCarthy in 1956 at the Dartmouth conference, AI was to solve logical and mathematical problems. Since then, it has been adapted in too many forms ranging from the development of computer games to chess-playing programs. Today, its most popular use is most likely a Google search engine. Though the intelligence of AI will unlikely come close to a human’s, its ability to perform certain tasks far exceeds that of a human.

2. How AI Can Improve Essay Editing

By training a machine-learning algorithm on examples of strong and weak writing, an AI can learn to identify elements most likely to undermine the quality of a draft. With this information, AI can then predict the low-risk/high-reward edits that an inexperienced editor is likely to overlook. Consider for instance a prompt to improve word choice that would likely be displayed by a thesaurus feature. While inexperienced editors are likely to overuse this and waste time on words that were fine to begin with, an AI could be programmed to search for synonyms only in cases where the current word has been identified as particularly weak given the rest of the sentence. In another example, a well-intended comment to “reorganize paragraph” will often be lost in translation to the actual changes made. An AI however, can keep constantly running track of a piece’s coherence and make educated guesses about changes to sentence order that are so profitable that they could only have been suggested. A recent study of our Virtual Writing Tutor grammar checker revealed that moves to improve conciseness were the most common revisions made in argumentative essays written by native speakers of English in grades 9 and 10. AI could be particularly helpful at making such edits. By training on a corpus that included essays both before and after a successful elimination of a particular verbose construction, an AI could detect the pointlessness of new instances of this construction and suggest deletion. And while less is known about what stylistic improvements L2 writers can and should make in differentiating between high and low levels of writing, AI can certainly help to spot and correct more mechanical errors. By doing all of this work, it is easy to see how AI has the potential to make editors, particularly those with a weaker understanding of writing mechanics, vastly more effective in impacting the quality of a draft. And in sparing all of these needless changes suggested by the original editor or any misinterpretations of them, AI can also save the time and frustration that arises from the realization that the draft was better to begin with.

3. Enhancing Grammar and Spelling

It may come as a surprise, but Grammarly’s AI editing also offers useful solutions. It is more than the run-of-the-mill spelling and grammar checker. Instead, it can actually correct errors and put things in order. This means that your work can be error-free and sound as professional as possible. As what is good grammar and spelling, if not a means to create clear and coherent work? This also saves time and confusion that comes from having to search for and correct errors individually. Because the software is learning based, it eliminates the need to consult a grammar manual, instead providing answers instantly. Furthermore, the software’s feedback can prevent users from making the same mistakes. This is particularly useful for non-native speakers who have a decent grasp on English, but may commonly misuse certain words or tenses. By alerting users to these mistakes with the consistency check feature, they can learn from them and become more confident in their writing. All in all, using AI editing for grammar and spelling ensures that users are putting their best written work forward.

4. Strengthening Structure and Coherence

How does AI achieve this? Programs such as MI Write and Criterion go through a two-step process before they can correct any essays. During the first step, these programs use the e-rater model, “a shared task between the Research and Development division of ETS and language technologies researchers all over the world” (“The E-rater Scoring Engine”). This process is able to evaluate the quality of the writing on more general writing tasks before focusing on specific research areas. This step is especially important when writing a significant volume of papers at the same time such as when an educator is designing an undergraduate course. If the writing quality is not up to the expected standard, the educator is able to provide additional instruction to help students improve their writing. During the second step, e-rater has the ability to analyze the specific elements of an essay such as content, organization, and language use. Based on what the peg program’s database of more than 1,500 accurate human-scored student essays has determined to be strong writing, the e-rater will select the best writers for understanding these elements and create a distribution showing how these writers have demonstrated their abilities. By comparing a student’s essay to this distribution, MI Write and Criterion are able to make an accurate assessment about the quality of this essay with respect to these elements. This is where e-rater is able to give a score, say 4, in regards to an element and explain why the student’s writing is not yet up to the standard of say a 6, thus providing critical feedback for students and educators.

5. Conclusion

The services of AI essay editing come with numerous benefits. Paying for the product and not the human may seem to be efficient in the short run, but the unfortunate truth is that editing software is simply not the match of a conscientious, empathetic human editor. Although AI can help identify writing issues, it cannot understand context, word connotations, or cultural implications. This means for non-native speakers, the utilization of AI can, in fact, be more harmful to their understanding of language use. Instead of learning language and structure improvements, they may over time become more reliant on simply using the software. It is also not beneficial to rely too heavily on software translation in editing other language versions, as this can create direct but awkward or inappropriate translations, again due to a lack of understanding of language use or cultural context. This is unadvisable for professional documents and potentially disastrous for creative writing. As the software continually learns and adapts language rules, a change in an older document may incorrectly alter it in the future. This would be a requirement for careful monitoring and could still result in inaccuracies.