Week 10 Lab: Co-writing exchange

A lab where you write a short piece with a predictive tool, log every suggestion you accepted or rejected, and trade logs with a partner

6 May 2027

Before the lab#

Pick a short-form writing task you’d be comfortable sharing — a scene, a short opinion piece, an email you’d actually send. You’ll need access to a predictive writing tool that shows its suggestions inline rather than generating a whole draft at once.

In the lab#

Write with the log running: every suggestion offered gets marked accepted, rejected, or edited-before-accepting, as you go, not reconstructed afterwards from memory. Reconstructed logs are consistently less honest than live ones, in ways people don’t intend.

Once finished, trade your piece and your log with a partner, but not in that order — they read the finished piece first and guess your acceptance rate before seeing the real log, then compare. Most people’s finished pieces give away much less about the editing process than they expect.

Afterwards#

Keep the log. Week 12’s closing lecture asks you to bring one specific suggestion you rejected and say why, and the log is the only reliable record of what you actually rejected rather than what you remember rejecting.