When I saw the photo above this installment of your article, I thought the circles looked like targets. I immediately thought: what are we targeting in our students’ writing? Grammar? Cohesion? Content? Style? Voice? Word choice? Academic honesty? Spelling? . . .

So, we as teachers need to give some thought to what we want to prioritize when we teach and assess writing, and presumably many of us focus on more than one aspect because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Can software look at all of the parts of writing and assess the whole? Not yet. Can it assess specific aspects? Some yes, but not always accurately. Will the software become more accurate as it’s developed further? Most likely, but if at that point teachers use software that can assess grammar, punctuation, spelling, will we be tempted to prioritize these aspects at the expense of equally important aspects of writing? If we ask our students to use this kind of software to check their grammar, will they focus more on grammar, spelling, punctuation and less on the message they are conveying? And will only certain language varieties be considered “correct?” In other words, will we lose voices in this coversation or will they be forced to adapt their writing style to the ones that are in the programming?