Writing, Research, and Ethical AI Use

In your First-Year Writing courses at UM, you will encounter AI as a subject worth thinking carefully about, not just as a tool to use or avoid. Writing Studies is uniquely positioned to lead this conversation, because writing is precisely where questions about AI, knowledge, authorship, and ethics become most consequential.

Our program takes a pluralistic, discipline-specific approach: rather than a single rule about AI for all courses, your instructor's course syllabus will communicate the specific AI expectations for your class. What is consistent across all FYW courses is the framework below, which is grounded in threshold concepts of Writing Studies (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2016) as foundational ideas about how writing works and how writers develop.

Accordion Group

Open All Tabs
  • “Writing is a knowledge-making activity”

    In FYW, you write to think, not just to record ideas you already have. Writing is how you discover what you believe, test what you know, and work through genuine uncertainty. AI tools can generate text, but they cannot replace this thinking. In your courses, you will learn to use AI in ways that serve your own knowledge-making, from generating ideas to formulating questions and gathering information, rather than substituting for the intellectual struggle through which you arrive at understanding.

  • “Writing is a social and rhetorical activity” — AI interfaces and output are not neutral

    Every piece of writing is shaped by who it is for, what it is trying to do, and the context in which it circulates. FYW asks you to develop this rhetorical awareness and bring it to your use of AI. AI tools are not neutral: their outputs reflect whose language, whose sense of ‘correct’ writing, and whose values dominated their training data. Part of AI literacy in our courses is asking whose voices AI recognizes and whose it distorts or erases and connecting that question to our field's commitments to linguistic pluralism and students' rich language repertoires.

  • “Writing speaks to situations through recognizable forms” — genre requires judgment, not just imitation

    In FYW, you will write in multiple genres, including analyses, research arguments, reflections, and multimodal projects. Learning to write means learning to read a situation and make informed choices about form, structure, and tone. AI can reproduce the surface features of a genre, but it cannot exercise the judgment those choices require. Your courses build that capacity in you.

  • “All writers have more to learn,” including about how AI changes writing

    Writing expertise is an ongoing practice. Even strong writers encounter new challenges, new genres, and new contexts that require continued growth. Learning to engage critically and ethically with AI is part of that development, not separate from it. In your courses, you will be taught how to evaluate, revise, and take responsibility for the tools you use, and you will practice transferring these skills to new writing situations inside and beyond the university.

  • “Writing is (also always) a cognitive activity” — reflecting on your process is not the same as doing it

    There is a difference between cognition (the thinking you do as you compose) and metacognition (the awareness of how and why you made the choices you made). Both matter in FYW. You will be asked not just to produce writing, but to account for your process: what you tried, what you changed, and why. This metacognitive habit is what allows you to carry your skills into new contexts, and it is work that belongs to you, not to AI.

  • “Writers’ histories, processes, and identities vary” and “Writing enacts and creates identities and ideologies”

    Your writing reflects who you are: your experiences, your thinking, your voice. Authorship is the exercise of that identity in language. For AI to contribute to your writing process, you must remain the author, able to account for every significant decision in your final text as an expression of your own thinking and judgment. Our courses also recognize that a student’s thoughtful choice not to use AI is a legitimate rhetorical decision that must be respected, not penalized.

What to Expect in Your FYW Course

Because writing is contextual, your instructor’s AI expectations may differ from course to course, and that is intentional. What will be consistent is that your instructor will clearly communicate AI expectations in your syllabus and on assignment sheets, and that those expectations will be grounded in what we know about how writers learn. 

Across all FYW courses, you can expect to: 

  1. Receive explicit instruction on how AI tools work, what they can and cannot do in a writing process, and how to engage with them critically 
  2. Be asked to disclose your use of AI (or your choice not to use it) in a manner your instructor specifies 
  3. Practice reflecting on your writing process and the decisions you made, whether or not AI was involved 
  4. Have access to shared resources, including the Writing Center, for support related to AI and writing 
  5. Encounter AI not as a shortcut but as a subject of inquiry: a technology worth understanding, questioning, and using with intention 

Your Rights and Responsibilities

As a student in FYW, you are expected to: 

  1. Follow the AI use policy in your course syllabus 
  2. Disclose AI use in the way your instructor specifies 
  3. Maintain authorial responsibility: be able to explain and defend every significant choice in your writing as your own 
  4. Engage critically with AI-generated content, understanding that it reflects particular values and can produce inaccurate or biased material 
  5. Understand that submitting AI-generated text as your own original thinking, without disclosure, is a violation of UM’s Academic Integrity policy 

You also have the right to make a principled choice not to use AI. That choice is exactly the kind of rhetorical and ethical judgment our courses are designed to develop. 

Writing Center

The Writing Center is a free resource for all UM students and offers support for writing at any stage of the process, including questions about AI and writing. Faculty are also encouraged to consult the Writing Center for additional support related to AI and writing pedagogy.

Visit the Writing Center

  • Framework grounded in: Adler-Kassner, L., & Wardle, E. (Eds.). (2016). Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies. Utah State University Press.
  • Threshold concept titles quoted throughout are drawn from individually authored chapters within that volume. Contributing authors, in order of appearance above: Heidi Estrem (1.1, “Writing Is a Knowledge-Making Activity”); Kevin Roozen (1.0, “Writing Is a Social and Rhetorical Activity”); Charles Bazerman (2.0, “Writing Speaks to Situations through Recognizable Forms”); Shirley Rose (4.0, “All Writers Have More to Learn”); Dylan B. Dryer (5.0, “Writing Is [Also Always] a Cognitive Activity”), drawing also on Howard Tinberg’s discussion of metacognition (5.2); Kathleen Blake Yancey (3.2, “Writers’ Histories, Processes, and Identities Vary”); and Tony Scott (3.0, “Writing Enacts and Creates Identities and Ideologies”).

Top