This presentation introduces helper-doc based prompting, a methodology grounding AI instruction in transferable rhetorical skills rather than platform-specific proficiency. Drawing on reflective video essays from 18 students in a Fall 2024 Writing with AI course at the College of Charleston, I demonstrate how adapting the professional documentation practices of the style guide for use as part of an AI prompt-writing process creates a sustainable framework for Human-AI collaboration. 

The use of style guides to mediate writers’ purposes and AI outputs helps transform AI from what one student initially called “a magic word box, a mysterious tool that produced results without clarity” into what another described as “creating a detailed brief for a collaborator.” These shifts parallel findings from Cummings, Monroe, and Watkins (2024), who report that structured AI engagement develops students’ attention to sentence structure, word choice, and audience awareness.

The helper-doc prompt writing methodology described in this presentation responds to emerging scholarship mapping where AI can appropriately intervene in writing processes by foregrounding what McKee and Porter (2022) call “rhetorical intelligence”—the capacity to identify exigency, analyze audiences, and create communications that produce meaning and value. The helper-doc approach makes contextual understanding the student’s explicit responsibility and available to AI tools through the automated process of algorithmically powered textual production.