When my colleague Dr. Paul Belanger and I were redesigning our writing course, we often joked about the dizzying number of what I affectionately call the “C models” found in writing studies. These models are intended to be easy-to-remember formulae for recalling important tenets of professional writing. What we found funny was that these models vary in range from four up to ten. Arley Cruthers, whose excellent OER Business Writing for Everyone provided several chapters for this resource, includes a chapter on “Sailing the 7 Cs“. It doesn’t help that the professional organization for writing instructors – the Conference on College Composition and Communication – is commonly called the “4Cs.”

Clarity, concision, consistency, and coherence are some of the most common among these C models. Dr. Belanger and I followed this pattern when devising a rubric that addressed generative artificial intelligence usage: connection, cognition, content, and construction. My colleague recently suggested we tweak our rubric and replace the C terms with comparable words that begin with the letter “I.” This was due to Dr. Belanger’s experience, “telling students that they put the ‘I’ into AI” (Teams chat, Jan. 13, 2025).

Brilliant!

Insight, information, implementation, and interconnection became the new rubric for our course and the guiding structure for this resource. Replacing “accountability” is also “integrity,” a value we both find crucial for professional writing in the age of GAI. This revision, in turn, led to a welcome reorganization of this resource. Readers will likely encounter remnants of the original rubric and other “C models” used by the authors curated for this resource. Riffing off of a common taunt aimed at eyeglass-wearing folks like myself, what follows is an introduction to this “four-eyed” model and how each category is defined:

The “Four-Eyed” Model for PROFESSIONAL Communications

What follows is an overview of the four pillars that help structure and organize this resource. This structure mimics the learning objectives of Dr. Belanger and my curriculum re-design of our business writing course. As mentioned, this re-design aims to accommodate high demand for the course. Ultimately, however, the criteria below address the changing demands of students by educators and future employers. The workforce is already changing and will continue to change. Our graduates will be expected to guide those organizations fortunate to hire them through these changes.

Insight

One of the strengths of GAI is its capacity for illuminating connections among subjects. The flip side of this, however, is that these connections are not contextualized by the lived experiences, histories, cultures, and perspectives of humans. These insights help us contextualize information and hopefully guide us to use that information for the betterment of our communities. One of the ways we strengthen our powers of insight is through critical reading, engaging texts and interpreting them through our lived experience and world knowledge. GAI can help us with the how. but it takes human insight to understand why. 

Applied critique can reveal a new understanding and innovations, which is reinforced through reflection. We take for granted that the information we take in has been processed over time through discourse, debate, and experimentation. Being a part of a professional discourse community requires sharing our insights. This expression of knowledge is a creative act that the developers of GAI have worked hard to echo through simulated insight. Without the human powers of insight, critique, and reflection, however, the responses provided by GAI tools should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Responses to

Information

Before we express our newly-formed insights in a professional setting, it is best to check our perspectives and beliefs through research and other forms of verification. Producing information from our insights is a process that is slow. Conducting research, for example, takes time when done correctly. In laboratories and library stacks, we are engaging in various forms of experimentation, testing our insights and beliefs against the forces of nature as well as the debates of other experts. This process can be uncomfortable. Many of us do not like to be wrong and avoid confrontation. Transforming our insights into information and innovation, however, often demands that we revise – and even discard – our beliefs. This presents one of the principal challenges of our day. Information that is manipulated to misrepresent reality can have disastrous and lethal effects.

When our research is properly and ethically conducted, and we allow for our insights and perspectives to change in reflection to our findings, we avoid the risk of misinforming others. It is also a good method of ensuring that we are not engaging with misinformation – or worse, disinformation, the presenting of false information to manipulate others. ChatGPT and other GAI tools have, to date, struggled to overcome issues with misinformation (getting the facts wrong). The term “hallucinations” was often used to describe the tendency of GAI to create information that seemed genuine. ChatGPT’s job is to provide us with the information we want in a natural manner so it is prone to generating misinformation. Which means that we often have to verify any responses these tools provide!

Implementation

Several years ago (before the release of ChatGPT), I noticed that the cover letters students were writing seemed similar. Although the writers of those letters did a good job of expressing interest in a job and sharing their experience, some of them shared similar grammatical styles and structures. For starters, it was perfect. Students consistently wrote with the mastery of most copyeditors. So consistent were these perfections, I found myself having to check grammar guidelines because they contradicted my own understanding of those arcane rules (turns out I was wrong!). In conversations with students, it turned out they were using Grammarly, a pumped-up spellchecker that also helps with grammar, syntax, and structure.

Grammarly and other tools are immensely helpful in “ironing out the wrinkles” in our writing – to a point. As students have pointed out, Grammarly and GAI tools iron out too many wrinkles. Everything sounds the same: flat and vanilla. It may be perfect writing, but it isn’t human. So while GAI should not be used to generate insights and cautiously used (if at all) to provide information, these tools do a decent job of implementing original work into conventional forms. Is there a catch? Of course.

As my example above illustrates, artificially-generated or edited language is “flat” and has become more recognizable as GAI-generated content takes over popular media. Words like “delve” and “leverage,” for instance, have become signals that GAI tools were probably used. Consider this in light of the fact that we are extremely suspicious and distrusting of things that pretend to be human, and you can see why we should be reluctant to rely on ChatGPT too much – even for light editing!

Going forward, I anticipate that GAI will become better at adopting our individual “voice” and we will be able to generate content that actually sounds more like us (wrinkles and all). Even when that day comes, we should be cautious about relying on these technologies. Along with insight and information creation, the implementation of our thinking is part of this recursive process of writing. In organizing this very page, for example, I felt that the order of the “four eyes” was awkward and somewhat illogical. As I compose this section, I have found myself ping-ponging between this and others sections to make sure I’m consistent. Could ChatGPT help me with this? Perhaps. But I would be missing out on my own learning, curtailing the writing-thinking relationship that is vital (another Grammarly term) to our professional selves.

Interface

The rote definition of interface is the point at which two or more complex systems interact with one another. We most often use the term to describe a form of technology: I am writing this using the keyboard to provide input to my computer; the monitor displays that the words I intended to type were input correctly; I click save on the website interface to ensure I don’t lose my work. Several complex systems are in play – computational, internet networks, writing platforms – and engaged through a variety of interfaces. The primary form of interaction with GAI is also through interfaces. One of the reasons that GAI has become such a phenomenon is due to the “natural” way we humans can interface with enormously complex machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) systems.

But this popular, computationally-focused definition often ignores that individual creatures are also complex systems. We interface with one another through face-to-face dialog, writing, images, artwork, music, games, text messages…The focus of this resource are those interfaces – the forms of communication we use to interface with other professionals – and strengthening our interfaces so that they are appropriate to our situation. As we will discuss, this requires an audience-centered approach that emplys empathy and considering the needs of those we are communicating with. Whether it’s one-on-one peer review or giving presentations to a room of professional colleagues, the content of our interfacing should always be guided by our audience.

Integrity

One of the understated priorities of education is helping us develop personal codes of conduct that are the foundation of being good citizens. Across the United States, there are laws and policies that serve to create a national, ethical code for the citizenry. These layers of policy, law, and rules are designed to inform the proper, acceptable behaviors expected of all people living in America. States apply another layer of educational standards that further reinforce those values prized by our regional communities. Both national and state policies are parsed out into guidelines and rules of conduct by school systems. In most classes, we begin each semester reviewing these ethical codes. In some courses, such as the Business Ethics course taught here at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, these are further unpacked, evaluated, and discussed.

Slightly different are the moral codes that guide our ability to distinguish right from wrong. Unlike ethics, morals may not be defined by policy and law but are often-unspoken agreements between individuals in a community. Ideally, these morals help guide us to pursue good and avoid, or at least reduce, the harm done to others. Like laws, they change and adapt to new information. As history through today’s news affirm, however, moral codes are as varied as individuals. We can’t always agree on what’s acceptable, nor do we define what is right and wrong the same.

I mention this because GAI has prompted us to pause and think about these codes. Writing courses the world over are wrestling with the morality of using GAI to conduct writing. Many instructors are sympathetic to the students and professionals who are being bombarded by different ethical and moral codes. Is using ChatGPT plagiarism? Is it cheating? Is using Grammarly to polish my writing acceptable? What about the spellchecker in my word processing software? Is Google search okay for research? What about Wikipedia? In my lifetime, there have been several of these “pauses” that have raised debates in our schools, making us confront long-standing ethical and moral codes. Unfortunately, our schools have become debate halls over this matter.

Why are these codes important? Because trust is important! In our academic writing, for example, it is why we quote others’ in a way that reflects their intentions and cite their work accordingly. As an instructor, it has how I recognize your integrity as a student. In business, trust is fundamental to building those relationships that are crucial to any successful business. Would you buy a product from a manufacturer who you knew compromised safety to improve profits? What about a restaurant reported to have failed multiple health inspections? Trust is a value that can be hard to win, but very easy to lose. Sometimes trust is built on fessing up, coming forward, and accepting the consequences.

Regardless of where GAI takes us, accountability is certain to become a highly-prized professional value going forward. Whether or not we use ChatGPT to assist us with writing, it is we who are responsible for our communications. Being accountable for our choices – even when they’re not the best – is one facet of professional integrity, a code of conduct that includes honesty, fairness, transparency, and other qualities. This code is comparable to the academic integrity policies that discourage plagiarism and other ethical breaches.

A professional of integrity writes in a manner that reflects their adherence to these principles. At the college level, you are expected to act with integrity but also develop those ethical qualities that are important to your field. Just like writing classrooms worldwide, the world of business is currently wrestling with the effects that GAI will have on these codes. Is using ChatGPT plagiarism? Is using GAI to communicate confidential information to clients appropriate? There are many debates (and lawsuits) that are posing similar questions and it will be you – tomorrow’s professional – that will have to be accountable for the new expectations, conventions, and ethics that will emerge.

A short, concluding section (“Integrity”) that addresses the use of GAI in professional communications is currently being developed for this OER. In writing this section, I assume that readers will have knowledge about the rules their schools and employers have regarding GAI usage. I am not, at this time, equipped to direct writers in their morals either. This is simply because the expectations for GAI usage are so varied, dynamic, and fluid at this time.

The one certainty is that we will continue to be accountible for our writing, be expected to conduct our professional and personal affairs with integrity, and be ethical and moral citizens.