From Crafting Text to Crafting Thought: Grounding Intelligent Writing Support to Writing Center Pedagogy

Yijun Liu, Tal August


Abstract
Intelligent writing support tools have evolved from solving surface-level issues to collaborating and creating language with writers. Along with these new capabilities come concerns that generated fluent text can impact writers’ processes in unintended ways, especially for students. In this workshop paper, we look to a similar transition that writing centers experienced over the last century, which shifted focus from fixing surface-level issues to maintaining student writer voices. We interviewed 10 current writing tutors and grounded their described practices with ideas proposed in writing center literature. We employed these strategies in developing an intelligent writing tool prototype. We describe the design of our tool and discuss potential evaluations along with how to foster deeper relationships between writers and writing centers using intelligent writing tools.
Anthology ID:
2025.in2writing-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants (In2Writing 2025)
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico, US
Editors:
Vishakh Padmakumar, Katy Gero, Thiemo Wambsganss, Sarah Sterman, Ting-Hao Huang, David Zhou, John Chung
Venues:
In2Writing | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
47–61
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.in2writing-1.5/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yijun Liu and Tal August. 2025. From Crafting Text to Crafting Thought: Grounding Intelligent Writing Support to Writing Center Pedagogy. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants (In2Writing 2025), pages 47–61, Albuquerque, New Mexico, US. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Crafting Text to Crafting Thought: Grounding Intelligent Writing Support to Writing Center Pedagogy (Liu & August, In2Writing 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.in2writing-1.5.pdf