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#academicwriting

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Bibliothèque de l'EPFL

🔍 Stay Away from Plagiarism
📅 15 May 2025 | 🕤 09:30–11:00
💻 Online via Zoom
⚠️ Only 5 spots left!

This hands-on workshop will guide you through common citation scenarios and help you avoid unintentional plagiarism in your thesis, articles, or reports.

✅ Understand the stakes of citation
✅ Reuse and cite content properly
✅ Identify incorrect referencing
✅ Interpret iThenticate similarity reports

📌 Secure your spot now: go.epfl.ch/training

#EPFL#Plagiarism#iThenticate
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Mark Carrigan

Academic writing has always been in flux

It can feel when reading academics discussing LLMs that previously settled practices have been suddenly upturned by the introduction of this strange technology into higher education. The reality is that our practices of writing and communication have been through many such changes, often within the span of an individual’s own career. I was reaching the midpoint of a PhD when social media came to be a prominent feature of academic life, offering a potent forum through which to connect with others and discuss ideas alongside an ever present possibility of distraction. During the same PhD I remember talking to my supervisor about producing an 800 page book on a type writer. I simply couldn’t understand how such a thing was possible. Much as I struggled more recently when reading Lamott’s (1994) description of repairing a three hundred page manuscript by placing it on the floor of a cavernous living room in order to reorganise it page-by-page:

“I put a two-page scene here, a ten-page passage there. I put these pages down in a path, from beginning to end, like a horizontal line of dominoes, or like a garden path made of tiles. There were sections up front that clearly belonged in the middle, there were scenes in the last fifty pages that were wonderful near the beginning, there were scenes and moments scattered throughout that could be collected and written to make a great introduction to the two main characters. I walked up and down the path, moving batches of paper around paper-clipping self-contained sections and scribbling notes to myself on how to shape or tight or expand each section in whatever necessary way.” (Lamott’s 1994: 100).

It’s not that I couldn’t do this with my own text. While I’ve still not had reason to find out how to print at my university, in my fourth year since starting to work there, I’m sure I could quickly print out this text if I was motivated to do so. I remember the feeling of holding my PhD thesis in my hands the first time I printed out the draft, suddenly feeling a sense of mastery over this diffuse thing which had been the horizon of my experience for so long. I can recognise the appeal in the physical, the ways of relating to ideas opened up when we get our hands on their material expressions.

It’s just that I struggle to imagine relating in such a physical way, even allowing for the fact that I would undoubtedly be printing an electronic manuscript as opposed to Lamott’s manuscript produced through a typewriter. I was never a routine user of a printer to begin with but the separation from my office printer during the pandemic, combined with a diffuse dislike of the clutter of paper, inexorably led me towards working without print outs. It’s now been at least five years since I last printed something out and it wasn’t something I did much to begin with. The physical manifestations of my writing have slipped out of my immediate experience, no longer presenting as ready-to-hand, in a way that leaves them lodged as an intellectual possibility. In the same way that academics of my generation will often find it perplexing to be reminded that paper journals were once collected and consulted in physical form.

When our routines are disrupted we often feel compelled to account for that disruption. If things don’t work as planned, we are led to reflect on what we expected to happen. It’s easier to see routines when they don’t work because when they do they simply fade into the background. The same is true for the role of technology within these routines (Marres 2014: loc 1919). The introduction of LLMs into academic writing provides such a disruptive occasion because it unsettles many of the assumptions upon which our routines have previously depended. It’s no longer the case that a coherent piece of text we encounter must have been produced by a human author. It’s no longer the case that completing our own text requires only human effort.

This technological shift forces us to confront what writing means to us beyond its mechanical production. Just as word processors transformed academic writing by making revision less laborious, LLMs challenge us to articulate what remains essentially human in our scholarly production. Perhaps what matters most isn’t whether we occasionally use AI assistance, but how thoughtfully we integrate these tools into practices that preserve intellectual ownership and creative engagement with our ideas.

#academicWriting#books#creativeWriting
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Mark Carrigan

✍️ How to enjoy writing in spite of the lure of generative AI

Over the last year I’ve been working on a book How to Enjoy Writing exploring the implications of generative AI for academic writing. I felt I had something important to say about the personal reflexivity involved in working with large language models, but in recent months I’ve realised that I lost interest in the project. Given the book was about cultivating care for our writing, as opposed to rushing through it with the assistance of LLMs, I’ve decided to break it up into blog posts which I’ll share here:

  1. The lure of machine writing and the value of getting stuck
  2. The Eeriness of Writing With Claude: When AI Mirrors Your Voice
  3. Thriving in Creative Darkness: Free Association and LLM Collaboration
  4. The Ethical Grey Areas of Machine Writing in Higher Education
  5. Machine writing and the challenge of a joyful reflexivity
  6. The Ebb and Flow of Writing: From Struggle to Unconscious Fluency
  7. Will Claude tell you if your writing is crap? The danger of LLMs for wounded academic writers
  8. Generative AI and the creative confusion of academic writers
  9. Using Generative AI for functional rather than expressive writing
  10. The Joy of Academic Writing in the Age of AI
  11. The Objects With Which We Write: The Materiality of Academic Writing in a Digital Age
  12. How LLMs change the relationship between thinking and writing
  13. Machine writing and keeping your inner world awake
  14. Finding Joy in the Creative Darkness: Reflections on Writing and Stuckness
  15. The subtle pleasures of LLM’s psuedo-understanding
  16. We urgently need to talk about the temptations of LLMs for academics
  17. Generative AI and thriving in creative darkness
  18. Academic writing has always been in flux
  19. Generative AI and the challenge of unbidden thoughts
  20. How the GAI Assessment Debate Has Led Us in the Wrong Direction
  21. Generative AI and the Anxieties of Academic Writing
  22. Why it’s not a bad thing for academic writing to be difficult
  23. The epistemopathic dimension of writing with LLMs
  24. The allure of LLMs as professional support at a time of crisis within higher education
  25. Prompting as a literary practice
  26. LLMs can be used to help us go deeper into creative difficulty
  27. Machine Writing and the Pleasure of Composition
  28. Why do I write? The question generative AI implicitly poses to us
  29. Why it’s not a bad thing for academic writing to be difficult
  30. Four Ways to Use LLMs as a writing partner
  31. The embodied experience of writing
  32. The Tea Ceremony of Writing: What We Risk Losing with AI
  33. What Makes Writing “Academic” in the Age of Generative AI?
  34. The sensory pleasure of academic writing
  35. Finding Joy in the Mud: When and How to Use AI in Academic Writing

This is Claude’s summary of the core argument which unites these posts into a coherent project. One of the reasons I lost my enthusiasm for the project was the manner in which its capacity to imitate my style, sometimes doing it when I hadn’t asked, disrupted the psychology of my enthusiasm for what I was doing:

The core argument of the book is that generative AI forces academics to confront fundamental questions about why we write and what writing means to us beyond mere productivity. While machine writing offers tempting solutions to the difficulties inherent in academic writing, these difficulties are actually integral to the creative process and intellectual development. If we embrace AI tools primarily as efficiency mechanisms to produce more outputs more quickly, we risk losing the joy and meaning that make writing worthwhile in the first place. Instead, we should approach AI as a conversational partner that enhances our thinking rather than replacing it, staying with the productive "trouble" of writing rather than seeking to escape it. This reflexive approach to writing technology allows us to resist the instrumental acceleration of academic life while still benefiting from AI's creative potential.

However I’ve used Claude to support the editing of these blog posts based on the 80% complete draft of the book, simply because I wouldn’t get round to it otherwise. It has copy edited extracts, condensed them at points, chosen some titles and generally polished the text. There’s a few bridging sentences it provided but nothing more than this. I’m glad it’s given this project a public life because I feel like I was saying something valuable here. But I wasn’t willing to produce a second book on generative AI in two years, as it felt like I was stuck in a performative contradiction which was increasingly uncomfortable.

Instead my plan is to focus on doing my best intellectual work by focusing, for the first time in my career really, on one thing at a time. I’ll still be blogging in the meantime as the notepad for my ideas, but I’d like to take a more careful and nuanced approach to academic writing going forward. I’m not sure if it will work but it’s a direct outcome of the arguments I developed in this book. It was only when I really confronted the rapid increase in the quantity of my (potential) output that I was able to commit myself in a much deeper way to the quality of what I wanted to write in future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IytEOXamsk

And this is how we rise - by taking a fall
Survive another winter on straight to the thaw
One day you'll learn to strain the tea through your teeth
And maybe find the strength to proceed to the peak
You press on into the thin again and cannot breathe
Swallow so much of my damn pride that it chokes me
The real risk is not a slipped grip at the edge of the peak
The real danger is just to linger at the base of the thing

This is a follow up to the 23 part series I did last summer on How To Enjoy Writing. In fact it emerged directly from “I have something to say here” to “I should write another book”, which is exactly the transition I’m now questioning in myself 🤔

  1. Be rigorous about capturing your fringe thoughts
  2. Placing limits on your writing practice
  3. Being realistic about how long you can spend writing
  4. Embracing creative non-linearity
  5. Keep trying to say what you’re trying to say
  6. Procrastination is your friend, not your enemy
  7. Knowing when (and why) to stop writing
  8. Initial reflections from my AI collaborator
  9. Identifying and valuing your encounters with ideas
  10. A poetic interlude from Claude
  11. Cultivating an ecology of ideas
  12. Claude’s ecology of ideas self-assessment tool
  13. Only ideas won by walking have any value
  14. Using generative AI as an interlocutor
  15. Word acrobatics performed with both harness and net
  16. Don’t impose a shape on things too quickly
  17. Creative confidence means accepting the tensions in how you think
  18. Understand where the ideas which influence you come from
  19. Not everything you write has to become something
  20. Being a writer means being good at AI
  21. Make your peace with the fact you don’t have creative freedom
  22. Confront the creepiness of LLMs head on
  23. Be clear about why you are writing
#academicWriting#claude#LLMs
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