Assessment Content

Editing Assignment 2, Option 2

Editing with AI Prompt Engineering

Value: 30%
Assigned: Week 4
Due: Week 10

Because this Assignment option is an alternative to a more traditional editing assignment, it will be "weighted" with a degree of difficulty factor of 1.07. In other words, the mark you earn will be multiplied by a factor of 1.07; for example, 66% would be changed to a grade of 66 x 1.07 = 70%.

Students may work individually or in small groups, contingent upon written instructor approval. Every group must obtain written instructor permission before proceeding. If you’re working as a group, ensure everyone’s name appears on the paper and that everyone is cc’d when submitting the assignment and other important correspondence.

I also expect every group to report anyone not doing their share of the work as soon as they notice it. Students who do not carry their share of the work will be removed from the group and asked to complete the assignment on their own.

Purpose and Task

Assignment #2 asks you to create a persona who is a writing editor with expertise in a particular area of editing, grammar, or style. For example, your persona could be a copyeditor, a substantive editor, a proofreader, or an editor with expertise in syntax (left- and right- branching and hypo- and paratactic sentences) or some other specialization.

Your persona should also have a personality suitable for guiding and advising someone in the undergraduate program at York University but not from the English or Professional Writing Departments.

You must use “Paolucci’s Executive Summary of A Prompt Pattern Catalogue” to guide your input.

Once you have created your persona and defined their specific editorial expertise, ask them to edit a writing sample you designed with the errors your persona can repair and report on what worked and what did not.

Instructions

Preparation

Define and refine your editor’s persona’s specific area of expertise, the persona’s editing skills, and the persona’s personality and document them into an MS Word file called assign2-firstnameSurname.docx. Remember: you may have to teach (or remind) your editorial persona what they know about calculating Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level readability and so on.

If you work in a group, name the document Assign2- Surname1Surname2Surname3.docx, where each group member’s surname forms part of the file name in alphabetical order. This file will contain all the details of your work.

Use section headings formatted using an MS Word stylesheet for the following topics: Definition of Persona’s editorial expertise and personality, a transcript of every prompt sequence you entered (number them in versions), a summary of how effective the results were when you tested the usefulness of your editor.

Discussing these matters with your instructor before engaging the LLM and throughout the project is in your best interest.

Engagement

Once you’ve completed these tasks, you can start by creating a deliberately bad sample of writing with the kinds of errors you want your editor to correct. Make sure to use scaffolding when you run the test samples.

Begin by starting a “New Chat;” every command you enter is remembered and considered active even if you leave the session (log out) and return later.

Eventually, when you decide to conclude the discussion, you will copy and paste a transcript of the whole chat session into MS Word. Include the prompts and a summary of the output.

Use your MS Word skills to format the transcript and make it fully accessible.

Analysis

You can embed your comments into the document in any number of ways, for example, by turning on Track Changes (especially helpful if you are working as a group because this MS Word feature tracks who said what) or by embedding your comments into the text using font, colour, etc. to indicate a comment or who is talking in a collaborative effort like the initials of a contributor [PP] or if you’re working along, just the comment itself like this: [This prompt was too vague; I should have established a persona first.].

Expertise Suggestions

1. How best to go about taking a difficult excerpt of a pre-20th century text [Shakespeare, Chaucer, John Locke, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche] and recalibrating it for a particular audience or purpose [Social Media platforms like Facebook, TikTock, Instagram or a demographic like learning disabled adults, ESL speakers, etc.].
2. Understanding readability better by the relationship between the different algorithms or tools for calculating readability or understanding the relationship between WPS (words per sentence) and SPW (syllables per word).
3. Find an editing specialization you like, the highest paying, or where the demand is highest.
4. Generate ideas and then specific procedures to become a better self-editor
5. Specializing in correcting and adjusting for Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level Readability
6. Specializing in correcting and adjusting for succinctness
7. Specializing in correcting and adjusting for embedding visualizations in manuscripts
8. An area of your own devising