Unit 4 Writing Assignment: An AI-Assisted Formatting Workflow

Lisa Bowman

MS in Applied AI, Belhaven University

AAI 502

Alexander Voitenko

August 4, 2026

Unit 4 Writing Assignment: An AI-Assisted Formatting Workflow

Before and After

While writing the content of papers, fiction, newsletters, or poetry is usually a task I enjoy, the formatting of documents is not. One of the best parts of working with AI for me is having Claude handle formatting. In this way, the AI does save me time and frustration with margins, headers and footers, and other technicalities.

Working on the Friends of Italy Society of Hawaii newsletter on Canva a few years ago is a good example. I spent about twenty percent of my time on writing and eighty percent on formatting. Now, I can write something such as this very paper and know I will paste it to Claude and he will produce a finished document in APA format as requested.

AI Output — Written by Claude

This entire document is the AI-generated output for this assignment. Lisa brings me raw, unformatted text from Pages or TextEdit, and my job is to create the finished document. She wrote every word of this paper except this section and pasted it to me; I produced the paper you are now reading — formatted in APA style, with the title page, headings, line spacing, indentation, and margins all generated by me.

In other words, the artifact being submitted is itself the AI's work product: Lisa's words, formatted entirely by the AI. This paragraph is the one part Lisa did not write, added so the AI output is clearly identified as required.

Productivity Report

The quality of the formatting is comparable to what I did on my own, but Claude is much better at finding typos and missing words, making sure citations are correct, and comparing what I have written to the actual rubric.

The new challenges are with editing. Claude formats the document into docx and I cannot edit it myself. I have to go through Claude for changes, with the extra steps of explaining what I want changed instead of just doing it myself.

There is increased productivity in other documents I need formatted. This summer I have been adding to a poetry collection as I write. I give Claude Code the new poem who adds it to my website, formatting a book in real time. The last poem stays the last poem as it echoes the first, but Claude Code has no difficulty in slotting my new work into the right place then pushes it live with my approval. This is the fastest way I have been able to format a book in decades of writing. If I do see something I want changed, I tell Claude Code and within two minutes the work is corrected and again available on the site. It really has been incredibly helpful to improve my productivity.

I will continue using AI for this task. Formatting different documents can be tedious and time-consuming. Having some assistance with formatting gives me more freedom to think, prepare, write, review, and finalize my writing.