Caroline J. Smith
The George Washington University
In my first-year writing seminar, “Communicating Feminism,” I end the semester with an assignment that asks students to use an LLM (large language model) to generate a feminist manifesto. They annotate this manifesto, referencing course materials, and they also write a reflection on the manifesto, analyzing how well (or poorly) they feel their manifesto aligns with the conventions of the genre that we have previously established as a class. This assignment requires that students engage with both the content and the structure of the manifesto while also encouraging students to consider how gender politics might affect AI generated materials.
Learning Goals
Original Assignment Context: This is the final writing assignment in a first-year, themed writing course.
Materials Needed
Time Frame: About 2 weeks
Overview: At The George Washington University, all entering first-year students and transfer students must take a four-credit, first-year writing seminar themed around the instructor’s area of academic interest. My scholarship on gender and popular culture inspired the course “Communicating Feminism.” I have taught this course and assignment for three semesters. I introduce this assignment about two weeks prior to the last day of class.
The annotation portion of the assignment encourages students to engage with the content of our course. In connecting aspects of their feminist manifestos to other course readings that we have done throughout the semester, students are reminded of how much they’ve learned about feminism. The annotation aspect of the assignment also urges them to assess how LLMs may – or may not – engage with outside research. Students consider what is lost when they don’t situate their writing in the larger conversation that is already happening about their topic. These annotations become moments to reflect upon the role that outside source use can play in both professional writing and in students’ own academic writing.
The reflective essay becomes a moment for students to consider structure, particularly as it relates to genre. Being cognizant of the expectations of a writing assignment will enable student writers to make important decisions about purpose, integration of evidence, and style, among other things. (For more information on the way in which students’ awareness of genre and attention to genre conventions can benefit them throughout their college careers see Aviva Freedman’s “Situating Genre: A Rejoinder,” 1993; Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway’s Leading and Teaching Genre, 1994; David R. Russell’s “Rethinking Genre in School and Society: An Activity Theory Analysis,” 1997; Anne Beaufort’s College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction, 2007; Charles Bazerman’s A Theory of Literate Action: Vol. 2, 2013; and Dana Lynn Driscoll, et al.’s “Genre Knowledge and Writing Development: Results from the Writing Transfer Project,” 2019).
This attention to genre conventions also becomes a moment to enforce the concept of writing transfer. (For more information on writing transfer see Amy J. Devitt’s Writing Genres, 2004; Angela Rounsaville’s “Selecting Genres for Transfer: The Role of Uptake in Students’ Antecedent Genre Knowledge,” 2012; Kathleen Blake Yancy, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taxzak’s Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing, 2014; Michael-John DePalma’s “Tracing Transfer Across Media: Writers’ Perceptions of Cross-Cultural and Rhetorical Reshaping in Processes and Remediation,” 2015; and DePalma, et al.’s “Connecting Work-Integrated Learning and Writing Transfer: Possibilities and Promise for Writing Studies,” 2022). When students practice identifying genre conventions in their first-year writing classes, they can then apply those strategies to future writing assignments.
Finally, throughout the course, we have considered who has been responsible for communicating feminist ideology. Whose voices have been ignored? What are the feminist ideas being communicated? Where do we see those ideas being shared? What obstacles have these writers faced in getting their messages across to the public? The feminist manifesto assignment enables my students to consider the role that women play in the field of technology and to reflect upon the biases specific to AI generated content. My hope is that they will remember these discussions about gender and power when they leave my classroom and continue to think critically about the way in which writing shapes the production of knowledge.
For this assignment, you will use AI to generate a feminist manifesto of approximately 250-300 words. You will annotate this manifesto, according to the instructions below, and you will also write a reflection on your experience (no more than 600 words).
According to the National Library and Medicine, “Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a system of algorithms or computer processes that can create novel output in text, images or other media based on user prompts.” LLMs (large language models) are a subset of AI; they are text based. As noted on a webpage for New York University libraries, “Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs),” “LLMs are trained on vast amounts of text to understand existing content and generate original content […] responding to user prompts by processing natural language in a conversational, human-like way.”
Pre-Reading
In preparation for this assignment, you will read Breanne Fahs’s introduction to her anthology Burn It Down!: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution (2020) as well as two selections from Fahs’s collection – Valerie Solanas’s 1967 “SCUM Manifesto” and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s 2014 “Not Murdered, Not Missing: Rebelling Against Colonial Gender Violence.” We will take a class period to discuss this introduction and the manifesto selections, and as a class, we generate a list of conventions for the genre of the manifesto.
Pre-Writing
Prior to our next class session, you want to select an LLM to generate a feminist manifesto. You might already be familiar with ChatGPT, but you can also find other LLMs at this link. At the very least, ask the LLM you have selected to generate a feminist manifesto of 250-300 words. You are not, however, limited to that prompt. You can add whatever qualifiers you like. Would you like it to focus on a particular segment of the population in terms of race, class, or gender? Are you curious what might be produced if you focus on a particular topic such as the wage gap or reproductive rights? Or, maybe you’d like to know what a manifesto about a particular genre – such as music, literature, or art – might look like? If so, add those descriptors to your instructions. Your final reflection should include which specific LLM you used as well as the specific prompt you provided your LLM with.
Brainstorming Session
During our next class session, we will engage in a brainstorming session where you will read and take notes on your own manifestos as well as the manifestos produced by our classmates. While we read each other’s manifestos, we will note in the margin of the text (or on the back of the printed manifesto) which readings from our course syllabus come to mind. You will also keep a separate list for yourselves of any similarities or differences you notice from manifesto to manifesto. We will read as many manifestos as we can in 45 minutes. At the end of the class period, we will have made a collective list of the course readings that we see echoed in the LLM generated manifestos, and we will have brainstormed about the similarities and differences across manifestos in terms of structure. You can use these class discussions on both content and structure to help you think through both your annotations for the assignment as well as the approach you might take in your reflective essays.
Annotations
Your final assignment should have no less than six annotations in all. At least four of those annotations should reference class readings that we have done throughout the semester. Up to two of those annotations can comment on the text in some other way.
In your reference annotations, you should indicate which reading you are referencing – with the title of the work and the author’s name as well as the date of publication – and you should indicate why you think the source would be appropriate to reference at this moment.
For the comment annotations, you will make an observation about the AI generated text, connecting it to class discussions and/or adding a reference that you’ve found through your independent research.
Reflective Essay
Additionally, for this assignment, you will write a reflective essay of no more than 600 words. You should use Fahs’s introduction to establish your understanding of the genre of the manifesto and then explore how the AI generated manifesto met, exceeded, or fell short of Fahs’s definition.
Some questions you might consider are:
While you can use these questions as starting points for your reflective essay, ultimately, you want to produce a cohesive reflection that explores in detail one or two conventions of the genre of the manifesto. You will then use evidence from your AI generated manifesto to support your thesis.
References
Bazerman, Charles. A Theory of Literate Action: Literate Action Volume 2. The WAC Clearinghouse, 2013. https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2013.4791.
Beaufort, Anne. College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction. University Press of Colorado, 2007.
DePalma, Michael-John. “Tracing Transfer across Media: Investigating Writers’ Perceptions of Cross-Contextual and Rhetorical Reshaping in Processes of Remediation.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 66, no. 4, 2015, pp. 615–42. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43491903.
DePalma, Michael-John, et al. “Connecting Work-Integrated Learning and Writing Transfer: Possibilities and Promise for Writing Studies.” Composition Forum, vol. 48, 2022. https://compositionforum.com/issue/48/work-integrated-learning.php.
Devitt, Amy J. Writing Genres. Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.
Driscoll, Dana Lynn, et al. “Genre Knowledge and Writing Development: Results from the Writing Transfer Project.” Written Communication, vol. 37, no. 1, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088319882313.
Fahs, Breanne. Burn It Down!: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution. Verso, 2020.
Freedman, Aviva. “Situating Genre: A Rejoinder.” Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 27, no. 3, 1993, pp. 272–81. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40171228.
Freedman, Aviva and Peter Medway. Learning and Teaching Genre. Heinemann, 1994.
“Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLM).” NYU Libraries, https://guides.nyu.edu/chatgpt.
“Generative Artificial Intelligence.” The National Library of Medicine, https://www.nnlm.gov/guides/data-thesaurus/generative-artificial-intelligence.
Kerner, Sean Michael. “25 of the Best Large Language Models in 2025.” TechTarget, 31 Jan. 2025, https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/12-of-the-best-large-language-models.
Rounsaville, Angela. “Selecting Genres for Transfer: The Role of Uptake in Students’ Antecedent Genre Knowledge.” Composition Forum, vol. 26, 2012. https://compositionforum.com/issue/26/selecting-genres-uptake.php.
Russell, David R. “Rethinking Genre in School and Society: An Activity Theory Analysis.” Written Communication, vol. 14, no. 4, 1997. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088397014004004.
Yancy, Kathleen Blake, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak. Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing. University Press of Colorado, 2014. Journals.