Turnitin is reportedly adding an online tutor that will aim to improve students’ writing as they write.

The tool will help students “move away from the ‘administrative challenges with writing’ … and be more of a ‘teacher’s aide,’” said Elijah Mayfield, Turnitin’s vice president of new technologies, in an Inside Higher Ed article.

Revision Assistant will focus on four areas for feedback: language, focus, organization and evidence, according to the article.

But Benjamin Erwin, an English professor at Syracuse University who works at SU’s Writing Center, is skeptical about whether the tool will be productive.

“While the program’s feedback on students’ writing may be helpful, the comments are most likely limited to the system’s ability to identify key words or syntactical structures within a student’s work,” he said.

Limitations to the software include the restriction of writing to 40 specific prompts that will be available at the new tool’s launch, according to the article.

As Turnitin works with schools and colleges that are interested in the tool, more prompts will be made available, according to the article.

Jenny Crisp, an associate professor of English at Dalton State College, said in the article that the tool will be most beneficial to students who tend to write late at night.

“They see things change. They see progress made,” Crisp said. “They just write more, and with beginning writers, frankly, just writing more makes the biggest different of anything I’ve ever seen.”

Erwin said the tool could be successful in the same way that Microsoft Word’s grammar and spellcheck tools are useful. He credited software for being able to identify specific errors in students’ writing, but he said he doesn’t believe software has the ability to “examine the overall quality of a text in relationship to a student’s assignment, audience and purpose.”

“Student’s writing processes can be incredibly complex, and preprogrammed algorithms or identification cues are largely ineffective at helping students beyond mere error identification,” Erwin added.

Turnitin has been popularly used for discovering plagiarism in student’s writing, and Erwin sees the website as a tool with its uses and setbacks.

Revision Assistant is taking on the role of a human instructor, but Crisp said she doesn’t see this transformation going perfectly.

Said Crisp: “I’m not sure it can ever replace a human instructor. If (students) spend some time with Revision Assistant, they’ll remember that they have to have a hook, that they have to have transitions.”

Published on February 3, 2016 at 10:58 pm

Contact Andrew: angodnic@syr.edu