Tag: academic-writing
8 items with this tag.
Still Yours: a doctoral researcher's guide to AI
A book written with Benita Olivier for postgraduate researchers, on using AI without giving up the development a research degree exists to produce. It takes seriously the question researchers are already asking: why bother doing a research degree when AI can produce much of the work? We think the answer is that, while a thesis is the artefact, the researcher is the point. The practical middle is organised by the kind of relationship a researcher has with AI rather than by research stage: thinking partner, research assistant, writing collaborator, mediator of relationships, project manager. Springer Nature, expected November 2026.
An open scholarship workflow: What academic publishing can learn from open source
Academic publishing treats scholarship as a finished, individually owned artefact. This post describes a writing and publishing workflow built on a different premise: that a scholarly corpus could work like an open source project — readable, contributable, forkable, and never permanently owned by anyone.
The writing was never the point: AI and academic writing identity
When AI could write everything I'd ever written, I had to ask: what had I been doing all this time? The answer changed how I understand both writing and AI — and what it means to be a scholar in a world where words are cheap.
Building arguments with AI
A field note on building arguments with AI: the brainstorming command I use to engage with any source, with an excerpt showing what a session looks like — Claude surfacing vault notes and Zotero sources, and why the conversation living in markdown matters.
The quality of the challenge: AI as a thinking partner
Most discussions of AI in writing focus on output. This post describes using AI as a thinking partner while revising a theoretical framework paper for journal submission, asking it for critique, arguing back where it was wrong, and testing the draft against my own voice. The exchange changed the paper's structure and how it describes its methodology, and showed that the value lay in the quality of the challenge.
LaTeX
A typesetting system in which you write the structure of a document in plain text and the system lays it out — the standard for theses, mathematics and anything with hundreds of cross-references.
Markdown
A way of writing formatted documents in plain text — a hash for a heading, asterisks for emphasis — so the source stays readable and converts to anything.
Pandoc
A command-line converter that reads a document's structure in one format and writes it out in another — markdown to Word, Word to HTML, anything to PDF — with citations intact.