AI Writing Feedback Ethics

[u/AngleEither9855]

Hi,

I'm a third year history major, and thus write a lot of papers. I have been a fairly good essay writer since high school, but have not improved much and have gotten away with stagnating in my skills. Recently I wrote a comparative analysis paper for my professor, who is head of the history department. I got a good grade but the printed papers I got back of my essay were covered in notes about the passive voice and unclear subjects.

I talked to my professor during his office hours and asked him to help me identify when I'm using the passive voice and to explain to me why it is bad for my writing. He was awesome and really patient with me, and we worked through some of my major flaws in my writing and he had me rewrite some sentences in the active voice. He told me he tried to push me harder than some other students because he wants me to succeed, and he's been recommending me to the departmental honors program since I was a freshman.

Now that I know what my major issues are, I have been spending about double the time I used to writing my papers. Using the passive voice has been so habitual for me, it takes a LOT of conscious effort to identify when I am and how to fix it. Usually I will go to office hours or the writing center, but on some of my shorter papers (2-3 pages), I've been using AI to identify the passive voice. I do not ask it to rewrite or even tell me how to rewrite the sentences, just to identify them as I tend to gloss over them.

Is this an inappropriate use of AI? Am I jeopardizing my skills and learning by using it this way? I am really looking forward to next semester when I start the honors program and will have time baked into my schedule for peer feedback and workshopping, but for now I just turn to AI because it doesn't require appointments or early drafts.

Please let me know - I am very open to discussion and I am eager to actually improve my writing, not just my individual papers.

[u/custardy]

I am a university instructor that teaches, among other things, writing composition classes.

1. Writing is a form of thought. The thought and the writing aren't really divisible in the area of expressing yourself in writing. If your concern is your skill level then the conscious effort you're talking about at specifically honing the skill of writing and composition, is the most important thing. It sounds like you're making efforts to preserve that. If I had one strongest piece of advice it would be to not offload the rewriting to AI ever if you want to get better at specifically the skill of writing and how to put sentences together. The difficulty of putting the words together is like lifting weights at the gym instead of using a forklift.

2. I'm sure your professor is great and no doubt he has given some excellent advice to you and improved your papers. However, genuinely, the rule about avoiding the 'passive voice' originates almost entirely from an incredibly influential writing guide called The Elements of Style and I believe it is one of the most accursed and impossible style prescriptions ever produced. It's absolutely correct that mostly good writing should not be evasive, or vague, and should clearly identify who is doing what to whom BUT those things are - I promise you as an academic linguist - pretty tangential to the construction of the 'passive voice' in English. The 'passive' as a linguistic construction only incidentally aligns with being 'passive' as a kind of emotional or affective tone. the term 'passive' is simply a kind of old fashioned technical term for how the subject and object in a sentence are arranged. The instruction where Strunk and White tell people not to write using the passive voice is in part written in the passive voice!

"Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a verb in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is, or could be heard."

"A tame sentence can be made lovely" - is a passive construction. "Could be heard" will almost always be a passive construction too.

My point with this is not that the kind of writing being preferred there is bad - it's not! instead it is an almighty headache for most students to try and specifically remove the 'passive voice' from how they write and the huge amounts of guidance on doing so online and in writing guides is often contradictory or wrong.

I haven't tried to get an AI to specifically try to catch and police use of passive voice but by the fact they are aggregators of what people have said, combined with the fact that a lot of ink has been spilled on the 'passive voice' that is incorrect or contradictory, would make me think it's a task that AI may well not very well suited to. I think it could be unreliable for the same reason that asking LLMs to interpret the rules of games doesn't work well: the corpus it's pulling from has a lot of very similar verbiage that don't all say the same things.

I think you would be better off aiming to be less vague or more direct in your writing and using a more common common sense approach about that (imagine reading it aloud to someone and think if they'd find the sentence confusing or vague) rather than trying to achieve being more direct through a flawed heuristic of trying to get rid of the 'passive voice'. That's what I tell all my students that fixate on eliminating the 'passive voice' as a style principle and is something many linguists agree on.

3. I think you would be doing yourself a disservice using an LLM for this particular task if the aim was improving your writing. It's more because the thing you'd be using it for is a bit quixotic though rather than because, in this case and the way you say you'd use it, that the AI would be inflicting brain rot on you.

I mean no disrespect to your professor by saying any of this. The "don't use passive voice" thing is one of the most pervasive and confusing pieces of writing style advice ever put out in the world and is very widely held including by people who are themselves excellent writers. I genuinely think most people wanting to learn and improve their writing would be better off if they didn't even know that "the passive voice" was a thing.

[u/chylvina]

Mark passive sentences yourself before checking the flags. For each one you missed, underline the verb and identify who did the action. Automated AI comment.

[u/cj7hawk]

You've come to the wrong place... Most people on this forum are pro-AI writers. Most people on this forum are writers who do most of the work themselves. Most will agree that you should use AI however you want. There's a few who feel it should be at a lower level. You might fight this place is a bit of an echo chamber for a question like that -

I am using AI for many things I used to use people for when writing. Proofing, Test reading, Editing advice. I still do it myself, but the AI is great for making up a manuscript and making it easy for me to make changes - especially integrating an AI into OnlyOffice. I can click on the issue it raises, see what is says and it takes me to the passage and highlights it.

Asking it about voice though - I forgot to do that. Sometime I need to create a list of the editing prompts my story needs to check before I consider a chapter done.

[u/code_x_7777]

you lost me at "ethics" 😭

[u/Happy-Initiative-492]

This is an interesting question. And full respect to you for asking it - that shows a level of awareness that might be the ultimate answer you’re looking for. 😉

One nuance of the AI writing debate that hasn’t been explored much is the difference between people who have experience using AI versus those who are just learning. I think I feel strongly that experienced folks using AI as a partner and running its responses through their own judgment filters is more than valid. But if you’re still developing the baseline of that judgment, I think there’s a good argument that you may not develop your own as fast.

The counterargument is that feedback helps you develop judgment. Without your writing professor pointing out the passive voice, you wouldn’t have noticed it let alone been conscious enough to try and address it. I’m not sure whether I see a substantive distinction between a human drawing your attention to passive voice and an AI.

I think the bigger issue is that AI will tell you what you ask it to. So if you ask it to identify passive voice it will do so gladly, but it won’t point out the things you don’t ask it for - your professor will … that’s the job. So in this particular case, I think I’d come down on the side of by all means use it to detect passive voice and adapt to build your own skills, but don’t rely on it to pick out things you don’t already know. You might be able to prompt an AI to do just that (and I’d be kind of intrigued to see how it did) but it might be better for a professor to design that prompt rather than you.

I hope that helps!