Academic Writing in the Age of GenAI

About

Workshop contents and objectives

Publishing scientific papers represents a core activity of researchers and, increasingly the career of young scholars is determined by their ability to publish in high-reputed outlets. The process has become more and more competitive with success rates on top-journals becoming extremely low and the publication process longer and extenuating in the extent of revisions needed. In such an environment, forging strong argument to convince reviewers of the novelty and robustness of your findings in order to get their support has become a core dimension of scientific writing.

Publishing in not just describing your own’s research. Rather, it is dialoguing with a scientific audience and forging arguments to convince reviewers to accept the validity and relevance of your statements. Good scientific writing therefore requires strong communicative and argumentative skills and the ability to customize your presentation to the social norms and interests of the audience (and the journal) you are targeting. These ability are largely acquired by young researchers in a trial-and-error process guided by their supervisors.

In this course, we want to guide you through this process by a mix of lectures and guided practical work. More specifically, you will be:

Introduced to the role of writing in science and to the importance of good writing for your career.
Introduced to rhetoric and argumentation as applied to scientific writing, i.e. how to craft compelling arguments that convince your reviewers.
Guided through the peer review process and helped through practical examples to learn how to respond effectively to reviewers’ objections.
Engaged in a challenging pitch where you have to present your research ideas, and you’ll get a critique to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your story.
Introduced to the usage of generative AI for scientific writing and testing its strengths and weaknesses in a practical exercise.
The course will build on two main pillars. On the one hand, an understanding of science as a community of practice, where scholars discuss their ideas in front of peers and engage in discussions about their validity, whose outcome determines whether these ideas are included as part of the accepted realm of knowledge. In such a perspective, activities such as presenting at conferences, writing scientific articles, submitting grant proposals are central to the development of science, as well as to the career of individual researchers. Scientific communication takes place largely through texts, which obey to specific literary conventions, but are also constructed to convince the reader and to refute objections using elements such as past authority (citations), logical argumentation, data, statistical analyses etc.

On the other hand, the course will build on theories of human communication, which extensively analyzed how argumentation can be used effectively to bring interlocutors, such as other scientists, to your side through strategic maneuvering. These theories lead to an understanding of scientific communication as a critical discussion, in which scientists advance and defend their ideas by respective a code of conduct that, for example, obliges them to take seriously the objection of peers and to respond through new valid arguments. In such a perspective, researchers are highly strategic in engaging in scientific debates and pursue multiple objectives, such as improving their work, getting their ideas accepted and enhancing the status in scientific communities. Conceptualizing scientific communication in these terms will help students to better understand how to manage their writings and how to avoid mistakes that might lead to a refusal of their ideas or results or to jeopardize their position within the community.

Workshop design

The workshop will be organized in face-to-face lectures and in practical exercises, in which students will analyze scientific texts for their argumentative content and simulate scientific debates playing both the proponent and opponent role.

Detailed lecture plan (daily schedule)

Day 1: Introduction: the role of writing in science. Introducing generative AI in academic writing.

Day 2: Analyzing arguments and writing strategies in academic publications

Day 3: The publishing process and dialoguing with reviewers.

Day 4: Crafting persuasive arguments in scientific papers.

Day 5: Paper pitches: defending your own ideas.

Class materials

Powerpoint slides
Set of exemplary papers
Selected readings by lecture

Course leader

Benedetto Lepori is titular professor at the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society of the Università della Svizzera italiana and senior researcher at the Austrian Institute of Technology; he is the scientific director of European Higher Education Sector Observatory (EHESO) and academic director of the Summer School in Scientific Methods in Lugano. Rudi Palmieri is Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Strategic Communication at the University of Liverpool

Target group

primarily graduate researchers, PhD researchers, early career researchers

**The Summer School cannot grant credits. We only deliver a Certificate of Participation, i.e. we certify your attendance.**

If you consider using Summer School workshops to obtain credits (ECTS), you will have to investigate at your home institution (contact the person/institute responsible for your degree) to find out whether they recognise the Summer School, how many credits can be earned from a workshop/course with roughly 35 hours of teaching, no graded work, and no exams.

Make sure to investigate this matter before registering if this is important to you.

Prerequisites

None, but PhD students already engaged in writing scientific papers will benefit most of the course

Fee info