Composing with AI

Step Two: Revising Sentences Based on the Diagnostics

The Williams curriculum scaffolds from diagnostic to revision by requiring students to continue to explicitly identify subjects and verbs, characters and actions prior to revising. The hope is that students will continue their focus on making the sentences more active as their first of ultimately several sequential steps in revising toward more readable sentences. My prompt and CGPT’s response for the first sentence:

Good morning. Using Joseph Williams principles of Style, identify the subjects verbs characters and actions in the following sentence: There has been speculation by educators about the role of the family in improving educational achievement.

ChatGPT
Good morning! To identify the subjects, verbs, characters, and actions in the sentence using Joseph Williams' principles of style, we can break it down as follows:

1. Subject: "There" - This is an expletive subject that doesn't refer to a specific character but serves as a placeholder.
2. Verb: "has been speculation" - This is the verb phrase. "Has been" is the auxiliary verb, and "speculation" is the main verb.
3. Characters:
   • "educators" - This refers to the group of people who are engaging in speculation.
   • "the family" - This refers to another entity discussed in the sentence.
4. Actions:
   • "speculation" - This is the action taken by educators.
   • "improving" - This is the action or purpose related to the family, which is improving educational achievement.

So, in summary:

• Subject: "There"
• Verb: "has been speculation"
• Characters: Educators and the family
• Actions: Educators engage in speculation, and the family is involved in improving educational achievement.

In this five sentence exercise, CGPT identified correctly subjects and verbs; however, where in a previous exercise it had identified individual subjects and verbs, this time it returned subject and verb phrases. In this example, CGPT identified the verb phrase with part of the predicate that is not the verb, the nominalization “speculation” in “has been speculation.” In this sentence, “has been” is a linking verb to connect with the placeholder subject “There.” “Speculation” is a nominalization that acts as a subject complement. Again, if a student identified this verb as “has been speculation,” we would need to coach them toward more precise revision, to ensure they could diagnose the nominalized action as distinct from the verb. When diagnosing subjects, CGPT also sometimes identified phrases, such as “Attempts by economists,” rather than simply “Attempt.” For another sentence, it identified the subject as, “The loss of market share to Japan by domestic automakers.” Working with a student, I would have to ask for further refinement, because the objective of the exercise—identifying the individual, grammatical subject to be able to determine if it is the character—would not have been met.

When identifying characters and actions, CGPT once again demonstrated a tendency similar to students to limit their search to words from the original sentence rather than supply an implicit character which the exercise sometime requires. For example, it identified “hundreds of thousands of jobs” as a character, rather than provide the implicit “workers,” and in a sentence identified “achievement” as a potential action in a sentence about education, but did not provide the character “students.” Further, in an academic, passive sentence, CGPT identified no possible character. From the original sentence, “There is a need for an analysis of library use to provide a reliable base for the projection of necessary resources,” Williams’ guidance would be to provide an authorial “we” as the character, but CGPT returned, “Characters: Not specified (general need).” CGPT’s tendency to not identify implied characters from actions highlights the interpretive work required in this diagnostic task of the Williams curriculum.

Having diagnosed for subject and verb, character and action, Williams guides revisions to the sentences for clarity, prompting students to revise with an identified character as the subject and an action as the verb. CGPT returned the following revisions:

1. "Educators have been speculating about the role of the family in enhancing educational achievement."
2. "Customers grew frustrated due to the store's price increases."
3. "Economists have struggled in their attempts to define full employment."
4. "Domestic automakers lost market share to Japan, causing the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of jobs."
5. "An analysis of library usage is necessary for us to establish a reliable foundation for resource planning."

Sentences 1-4 all complete the basic task, with subjects and verbs revised to characters and action. In a class discussion, we might request students to examine whether sentences would be improved with further revisions around achievement, increases, and disappearance (loss), but all 4 would demonstrate having accomplished the objective of the exercise. Sentence 5 fails, as CGPT did not diagnose a character and does not provide one. Interestingly, CGPT did introduce a character in this revision “us” absent in the revision, but didn’t make that character the subject. We might judge these revisions as overall successful, but with room for improvement, as would be typical of students at this stage.

According to the Williams curriculum, sentences without characters and actions as subjects and verbs often have two kinds of common grammatical and stylistic problems: nominalizations and passive verb constructions. A number of Williams’ exercises ask students to pay attention to these types of problematic constructions and think of them as the sites to find “missing” characters and actions in their revisions.

As a refresher, nominalizations in these cases are mostly verbs that have been made into nouns. “Run” becomes “Running” and then operates as a subject or an object in a sentence. This tends to both move the act of running out of a verb position and also to hide or re-position the character who is doing the running. For example, “Running on a record as a prosecutor was done” rather than, “The candidate ran on their record as a prosecutor.” Passive verb constructions move the agent or actor of the verb out of the subject position, typically either into the predicate or removed from the sentence altogether. These have historically been common in academic styles, although Williams (and many or most current academic style guides) prescribe instead writing in an active, character/action voice. An example of a problematic passive construction might be, “An analysis is presented in what follows” whereas Williams would prefer “We present our analysis here.” Williams is careful to acknowledge passive is a useful construction when purposeful and appropriate.

When given the guidance to revise sentences making nominalizations into actions and verbs, and to make characters into subjects, CGPT performed fairly well, especially where nominalizations had evident characters. For example, CGPT revised “Lincoln's hope was for the preservation of the Union without war, but the South's attack on the Fort Sumter made war an inevitability” into “Lincoln hoped to preserve the Union without war, but the South's attack on Fort Sumter made war inevitable.” This improvement would meet the threshold for success with a student, because the main, root subject and verb are revised. However, CGPT missed the opportunity to revise the second clause of the sentence, leaving the nominalized “attack” as the subject. A more thoroughgoing revision would have perhaps been, “…but when the South attacked Fort Sumpter, they made.” We would encourage the student to revise for character and action consistently, not necessarily just the first occurrence.

In sentences where a character was not explicit in the original sentence, CGPT often failed to provide one in the target sentence when revising nominalizations. For example, CGPT the original sentence, “Contradictions among the data require an explanation” was revised to, “An explanation is required for the contradictions among the data.” This is no substantive improvement, where Williams is looking for a target revision with character, such as “We must explain…”. This example and more like it in the exercises solving for nominalizations further demonstrate CGPT’s reticence to provide subjects/characters that are not explicit in the original. If I further prompted to revise a specific sentence and I supplied a possible character to use as subject, CGPT revised effectively. However, this isn’t something most, or perhaps any students would do. Identifying an absent or implied character is the difficult interpretive work here for students as well; if they would have to provide that interpretation, CGPT fails to provide much added value.

Similarly, because passive constructions also tend to displace or hide active characters, CGPT failed frequently at providing characters as subjects when revising sentences with passive constructions. The following are representative samples:

CE: Please revise the following sentences so that characters are the subjects and actions are the verbs: A decision about forcibly administering medication in an emergency room setting despite the inability of an irrational patient to provide legal consent is usually an on-scene medical decision. The performance of the play was marked by enthusiasm, but there was a lack of intelligent staging. Despite the critical panning of the show's latest season the love of the loyal fans was not affected. The rejection of the proposal was a disappointment but not a surprise because our expectation was that a political decision had been made.

ChatGPT
Certainly, here are the revised sentences with characters as the subjects and actions as the verbs:

1. Medical professionals usually make a decision about forcibly administering medication in an emergency room setting despite the inability of an irrational patient to provide legal consent.
2. The actors' performance of the play was marked by enthusiasm, but the director lacked intelligent staging.
3. Despite the critical panning of the show's latest season, the loyal fans' love was not affected.
4. The rejection of the proposal disappointed us, but it did not surprise us because we expected a political decision had been made.

Across many sentences with passive constructions, CGPT failed to consistently identify and provide a character to employ as a subject of an action/verb. In revision 1 above, CGPT does infer the character/subject “medical professionals” and provide “make” as an action verb. However, in 2 we see that while CGPT did identify actors as an implied subject, it did not revise to make it active (such as “actors performed enthusiastically”). CGPT struggled in these two ways: identifying an appropriate, implied character and consistently converting appropriate, nominalized actions into verbs.