In ENGL 801 “Graduate Studies in English,” a required course for incoming M.A. students, we have always asked our graduate students to develop an original contribution to a current scholarly conversation about a literary or cultural text.
Starting in 2020, we added a final writing assignment: we asked our graduate students to create a piece of public scholarship (700-1,000 words), tailoring their academic paper and its scholarly intervention of 10-12 pages for a general-interest audience.
Students followed the guidelines shared by Irene Dumitrescu in her essay “What Academics Misunderstand about ‘Public Writing’”: “you should follow Horace’s advice for poetry: Aim to instruct or delight – ideally, to do both. Tell your readers a story, and give them the basic information they need to take it in. Avoid jargon for the most part, but teach your readers a key term when it will help them understand your topic better.”
Based on the initial success of this assignment, we’ve continued it in Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, and Fall 2024 — and now in Fall 2025.
During the next weeks, we’ll be featuring here the pieces of public writing from Section A (taught by Cameron Leader-Picone) and Section B/ZA (taught by me) selected for publication following anonymous review by three faculty members. Today, we start with “Who is Writing?” by Mizanul Bari (MA ’27) from Section B/ZA. Enjoy!
— Karin Westman, Professor and Department Head / Instructor for ENGL 801 B/ZA (Fall 2025)
In the history of academia, no punctuation marker has ever been more criminalized than the em dash.
Even for me, every time I see an em dash in one of my students’ essays, in the back of my head I hear “Hi, I’m Suspicious.” The introduction sounds as if they are a mythical figure, but their company, the sentence structure, and word choice tell me they stepped in from the back street. Then I consciously and subconsciously start investigating the essay.
The distrust has been rising rapidly for other instructors and me. The more we push back against generative AI, the more students use it relentlessly.
The tension appears everywhere. Some academics are worried that the use of AI will take away originality, while others see it as a tool for making writing easier. But at a basic level, most people sit between these views as they use AI because it is available and easy to use.
The catch here is that most people do not know what the machine is actually doing to their cognitive abilities.
In higher education, the debate is more intense as the questions on integrity are of great concern. So, if a researcher uses AI to write the full draft of their papers or part of their papers, then who is actually the author? More so, if AI can produce a paper, then what is the need for human academics? These questions reflect a broader sense of uncertainty about what counts as authorship, and they narrow the conversation to fear rather than practice.
What gets lost in these conversations is the everyday reality of how people actually use AI. Do we humans, or more specifically students, use AI to replace ourselves? No… at least, I think that is not the case. We evolved as a species to survive; extinction is not our inherent instinct. What I believe is that students use AI because it is available, because it is convenient, because it is fast, and because sometimes it is unavoidable.
So, there is a growing need for a universal and shared method by which students can use AI without losing their voice and authorship. My proposed framework, building on the DEER framework put forth by Cummings et al., is the Integrated Reflective AI Writing (IRAW), a small attempt to offer that structure. Through the IRAW framework, students actively interact with generative AI in a recursive process. In composition studies, recursive writing is a way where students revisit various steps of their writing. Hopefully, through the IRAW framework, students can engage with AI through guided instructions, which in turn will help them improve their writing skills.
My framework has five distinct steps, namely: Define the Task, Strategize AI use, Engage with AI Output, Collaborate, and finally Reflect. Also, to fully realize the impact AI has on writing, there are two looped steps: Awareness and Revision. Since students will be working with a machine, Awareness and Revision in every step are necessary to check and evaluate what AI generates. It is important to note that my structure does not claim to map the entire writing process, but instead, it offers a coherent process through which students can identify the cognitive, rhetorical, and ethical aspects of collaborating with AI.
Here are the five steps of the IRAW framework:
- Define the Task: The writer begins by clarifying what they need, the purpose of the task, the audience, etc. The define stage will slow the impulse to prompt blindly and will make it more intentional.
- Strategize AI Use: Here, the writer decides how AI should participate in brainstorming, clarifying an idea, organizing a paragraph, or evaluating an outline.
- Engage with AI Output: The writer reads the AI output carefully to check accuracy, coherence, and tone. They accept the text only if it aligns with their goals.
- Collaborate: The writer blends AI suggestions with their own judgment and feedback from their instructors.
- Reflect: The final stage allows the writer to step back and consider what they learned and how the learning influences their voice and authorship.
Across the above five stages, two looped steps (awareness and revision) support the process. Awareness makes the writer attentive to limitations and biases. And revision allows them to modify both the prompt and the AI output.
My framework treats AI as something writers must use with intention. Hopefully, through my framework, students will be able to maintain control over their voice and authorship. What I hope students to achieve through my framework is the understanding that the writers need to contribute direction and judgment to give meaning to synthetic writing. It’s time we start adapting rather than prohibiting. To create a universal framework for using AI, scholars from every sphere need to come together and contribute. Most importantly, scholars and instructors from the field of English have the opportunity to lead the way, as we are the ones who work with the product AI produces – the sentences themselves (em dash courtesy of the author).
Works Cited
Cummings, Robert E., et al. “Generative AI in First-Year Writing: An Early Analysis of Affordances, Limitations, and a Framework for the Future.” Computers and Composition, vol. 71, 102827, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2024.102827.
“The Future of Work: AI and Human Collaboration.” QodeQuay, https://www.qodequay.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/The-Future-of-Work-AI-and-Human-Collaboration.webp.
— Mizanul Bari (MA ’27)
K-State English 
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