ChatGPT & Grammar

This past weekend I was at a conference in Las Vegas. At the conference, my colleague Diana Simon presented on her recent book–The (Not Too Serious) Grammar, Punctuation, and Style Guide to Legal Writing. During the social time after the presentation, someone asked how ChatGPT handles grammar.  While many professors are stressing over student use of ChatGPT, some professors are considering a key question: Can ChatGPT help me grade papers (at least grade grammar)?

I was mostly just eavesdropping while the professors were discussing grammar, but at least one person noted that ChatGPT does a pretty decent job, and it can give you explanations. Turns out that is right. Stephen Horowitz, a professor of Legal English at Georgetown, has a detailed blog post on how he used ChatGPT for an assignment with his LLM students. For the assignment, he had his students run a short essay through ChatGPT with the instruction to “Please fix any language issues in this essay.”

While I commend the full post to you, I will share just his conclusion: 

What I really liked about the assignment is that it succeeded in helping my students build grammatical awareness. Also, I think my students greatly appreciated a way to get detailed language feedback. In my class, while I provide language feedback to the extent it connects to the communicative purposes related to legal analysis and writing, it’s not a grammar class and I don’t have the bandwidth to provide detailed language feedback on every aspect of the students’ writing. (A statement I’m assuming many in the legal English/legal writing field likely relate to.) Additionally, I believe there’s a certain amount of value in receiving the feedback in a manner removed from the power dynamic associated with the student-teacher relationship, i.e., not from an authority figure who has the power to decide your academic fate, but from a neutral, non-judgmental chatbot. And I think it also opens up the potential for more focused conversations and questions between student and teacher about language and grammar, as it helps narrow down areas of student concern from the perspective of each student.