Composing with AI

Step One: Diagnosing Subjects and Verbs, Characters and Actions

Among the number of principles that guide the Williams style curriculum, some are explicitly grammatical and syntactic. The first steps for students in the curriculum are to diagnose sentences to help identify problems in sentences and what is problematic in those sentences. The first of those diagnostics is to identify the subject and verb in a sentence, the foundation upon which the rest of Williams’ guidance builds. While identifying subjects and verbs in sentences in foundational, Williams’ actually spends little time providing curriculum and exercises for doing so, leaving instructors like me the freedom to invent exercises for students to practice this sometimes dusty and rusty skill. My first work with CGPT, then, was to employ some of these practice sentences and ask CGPT to identify subjects and verbs therein. Here are a few examples from the 17 I used to test CGPT, adapted from Hopper:

A course in basket-weaving does count for credit under the Creative Activities requirement.
After sunset astronomers will be able to see the new comet. Just one of these new super high density disks can hold the entire manuscript.
If the electric fence were down, the dinosaurs would be able to reach the compound.

The sentences range from simple to complex and difficult, including dense noun phrases that distanced the subjects from the verbs, passive verb constructions, and an “it-clause” sentence. Overwhelmingly, CGPT correctly identified subjects and verbs in the sentences. Its single error came in the sentence: “Just one of these new super-high density disks can hold the entire manuscript.” CGPT identified “disk” as the subject and “can hold” as the verb. Most students do too, until re-trained and practiced. Technically, “one” is the subject of the sentence with disk as the noun of the modifying prepositional phrase. It’s also unknown why CGPT made the subject singular, especially since either “disks” or “disk” would agree with the verb “can hold.” In sum, CGPT gets 16 of 17 correctly, outscoring most students in the early days of the term on this introductory activity.

The Williams curriculum does provide a large number of opportunities for practicing the next diagnostic step: identifying characters and actions in sentences, along with subjects and verbs. Williams’ less grammatical, early guideline for basic style revision is that readers have to do less work interpreting sentences that are strongly narrative, and implores students to interpret the story implicit in each sentence, and to identify (potential) characters and actions. When this is done concurrent with identifying the subject and verb of the sentence, we can diagnose whether the subjects are already characters and the verbs already actions taken by those characters, or not.

After subject-verb identification the next diagnostic activity of the early Williams curriculum is to identify characters and actions within a sentence and to identify whether or not they are the subjects and verbs of that sentence. Williams teaches that an active, narrative style is most readable for most audiences in most contexts. Early tasks involve identifying the potential characters and their actions in sentences, whether or not they are the subjects and verbs of those sentences. This is a necessarily interpretive activity, as there may be more than one potential character within a sentence. Students are required to decide who the sentence should be about, who should be the character in the sentence taking the actions that are the verb (if the sentence is transitive/transactive). Studens also have to identify an action in sentence where—in the original—that action might be nominalized or implicit. Identifying character and action are both more challenging interpretive tasks for most students than identifying grammatical subjects and verbs.

CGPT did well again with this diagnostic activity. I gave it several sentences and the task of identifying the subject, verb, character, and action of the sentence. CGPT identified all subjects and verbs correctly. It also identified useful characters in all sentences. CGPT struggled more with identifying the action within the sentence . For example, in the sentence:

The blueprint for the proposed, blue house has been a challenge for the architects beyond the expectations that they brought to the project.

CGPT identified “challenge” as the action to go with the character architects, but our target revision would not be that “architects challenge”. Like many students, CGPT is looking for the action to be explicit within the sentence when, in this case, to make the sentence active with characters as the subjects the verb will need to be provided from context. However, when I asked CGPT a second time, it provided a successful answer: characters-architects, actions-faced. This would allow the revision “Architects faced greater challenges than they expected when they designed the blueprint for the proposed blue house.” This would be a successful, target revision for the Williams curriculum. So, on repeat tries, CGPT went from attempting to find the action from within the sentence to finding an acceptable action that wasn’t.