GenAI and Academic Writing: Prompting, Suggested Use, and Limitations

When it comes to using GenAI in your writing process, there are certain approaches and guidelines that you should follow. GenAI is innately designed to complete writing tasks, promoting the perception of efficiency. However, when GenAI is used to complete large parts of your writing, your ability to develop as a writer can and may be negatively impacted. GenAI can be implemented strategically to enhance your writing process so that you are primarily doing the writing and learning how to grow as a writer. Below is a list of recommendations of important aspects to consider when using GenAI and examples of how you might implement GenAI during your writing process.

Differences Among GenAI Software

With the explosion of GenAI technologies, it is important to know that while at the core they generally all function the same, how they perform tasks can differ. Different GenAI technologies have different intents, even if not clearly stated. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to what type of output you get from different platforms. GenAI platforms have different attributes, from the quality of the output to the level of data protection and privacy, to the overall intent of the platform. It is important to be aware of these differences, big and small, as you experiment and use different GenAI platforms. Ultimately, the University recommends students use Copilot.

Prompting

When using GenAI platforms, prompting literacy is an important part of getting the most desired output. There are 3 primary components that you want to ensure are included in your prompts:

Context: It is important to provide as much information as possible in your prompts or in follow-up prompts. These systems can only work with the context you provide it. Providing enough context may lead to better output from the system.

Constraints: Providing constraints will let the system know what you do not want it to consider, which may lead to more precise output. Additionally, understanding what the system can and cannot do will help you know what it can help you with.

Audience: It is important to provide an audience in your prompt because without, the output that is generated may not be applicable for your writing situation.

Ultimately, the goal is to be as specific as possible when prompting GenAI chatbots to ensure the response is catered to what you are writing about. GenAI does not know what you do not provide it. Additionally, do not be afraid to revise your prompt multiple times because typically, you will not get the desired output with the first prompt.

Bad prompt: Give me feedback on this paragraph.

Revised better prompt: Provide feedback for this paragraph that is in my academic paper for my class on “x.” I primarily want feedback about the overall flow of the paragraph, with special attention given to the connection of ideas. The audience for the paper is “y.”

In the “bad prompt,” there is no specificity about the paragraph’s content or purpose. But in the revised prompt, the context of the paper is provided (the type of paper and for what class it is for), constraints are provided (the type of feedback is specified), and an audience is provided. In order to have effective prompts, the more information you provide, the better the output!

Regeneration

Some GenAI chatbots have a regeneration button that you can select that will redo the output.

Screenshot of Gemini's re-do button — Gemini’s regeneration button

Screenshot of ChatGPT's try again button. — ChatGPT’s regeneration button

These buttons allow you to have the chatbot reprocess your prompt to deliver revised output if the first output is not what you are looking for. Regenerating the prompt is a good way to better understand how the chatbot is understanding your prompt as well as helping the AI generate better output. Using this approach in combination with revising your prompts will lead you towards receiving output that aligns more closely with your desired outcome.

Examples of Types of Uses

Brainstorming

GenAI could be a good place to help you navigate through the initial brainstorming stage. For example, if you are struggling to figure out a topic for your paper, GenAI might be helpful narrowing your topic. But remember, you want to always start with your initial ideas and use GenAI to build on what you are thinking by providing some direction where GenAI can assist.

Screenshot of Copilot response, listing bulleted suggestions under the headers Focus on a Specific Aspect of Society, Focus on a Specific Platform, and Focus on a Specific Age Group or Demographic. — Prompt: Give me some suggestions on how to narrow down the follow research question for a paper in my first-year writing course: “What is the impact of social media on society?”

Outlining

When it comes to using GenAI for outlining, you should avoid having it create the outline for you. Instead, use GenAI to help organize your thoughts or provide a model outline for the type of paper you are writing. There are always multiple ways to structure a paper, and you should keep in mind that no two papers on the same topic will be organized that same way. Therefore, use GenAI as an aid for crafting an outline and not as an authority.

Screenshot of Copilot outline that includes a title page, introduction with subpoints, literature review with subpoint, and argument development. — Prompt: Provide me with an outline for how I might organize a research paper for my upper-level college seminar course that must include the following components: peer reviewed sources, literature review counterarguments, rebuttals, and personal opinion.

Proofreading and Editing

Using GenAI to help with proofreading or editing revisions should mainly be used to help with clarity, structure, or grammatical errors. While GenAI can do the revisions for you, you still need to develop the skill to edit your own work and assess the AI output. AI is not always correct, and its suggestions may alter the meaning or intent of your writing. So, consider only giving AI excerpts or a few sentences of your writing before using its suggestions and editing the rest of your writing yourself.

Screenshot of Copilot suggested revisions, which discuss subject-verb agreement, verb tense correction, redundancy removal, plural consistency, adverb correction, and clarity and flow. — Prompt: Provide suggestions for revising the following sentence: “Climate change are causing many problems which the scientist doesn’t knew about it before and now they trying to fix them fastly.”

Revising for Tone and Style

In the revising process, GenAI can be useful for helping you modify the style of your writing or word choice/vocabulary. But remember you do not have to implement everything GenAI suggests. Additionally, it is always better to only provide a sample of your writing and then to use the suggestions GenAI provides to develop your writing skills by revising other parts of your paper on your own.

Screenshot of Copilot output that suggests a revised academic version and alternative word suggestions. — Prompt: Provide me with alternative word suggestions that help the following sentence sound more professional for an academic research paper: “Social media is basically messing up a lot of teenagers’ mental health because they spend way too much time scrolling and comparing themselves to other people online.”

Cautions about Using GenAI

AI Writing Style

Even though GenAI can help you write and revise your writing, the way GenAI produces or replicates human writing often has an identifiable style that distinctly sounds different. GenAI tends to write in style that is robotic and generic. It attempts to follow dominant writing styles and predicts sentence patterns, often writing sentences that may be grammatically correct but not innovative or creative. GenAI typically lacks the ability to provide the contextualization and elaboration that writers bring to their writing–two factors that contribute to sophisticated academic writing. Therefore, writing produced with GenAI does not contain your original voice and ability to innovate writing beyond typical writing norms.

Reading Comprehension

While GenAI can help you understand certain concepts and arguments in academic articles or required readings for courses, it should be used for these purposes sparsely if at all. You need to develop critical skills to comprehend texts without the use of AI. Overreliance may impede your learning comprehension abilities. Additionally, some texts are copyrighted material that may not already be in the algorithm’s dataset; therefore, uploading a text could be violating copyright policies.

If you are going to use GenAI to help with your reading, there are more intentional ways that avoid just copying and pasting a text into a prompt and asking the chatbot to explain it. Instead, you might take an excerpt, provide your interpretation of that excerpt, and ask the chatbot if your understanding of the text is correct.

However, it is always good to remember that even GenAI is not always correct and tends to lack a nuanced understanding of many topics. GenAI might misrepresent or misinterpret certain topics. If you are struggling, it is always best to go speak to your instructor, TA, advisor, or maybe a fellow classmate if you need help understanding content of a reading.

Idea Generation

Similar to the use of GenAI for reading comprehension, caution should be taken when using GenAI to generate ideas. GenAI most likely will give you more popular ideas that are abundant in its dataset rather than give you new or innovative ideas. A lot of academic writing requires you to discover gaps in a particular subject area where you can offer a contribution, even if it is a small contribution. GenAI is bound to its dataset, so it may rarely give you an idea that is less researched. Even if it gives you an idea that may be less researched, AI may be misunderstanding the subject field.

Furthermore, you want to ensure that you are the author of your work by knowing the content and how it is developed throughout your writing. Your courses teach you how to enter academic conversations, and by offloading that labor to GenAI, you are prohibiting yourself from understanding and developing your ideas on your own and becoming someone knowledgeable in your field.

GenAI may be able to help you refine or think through your ideas, but it should not be used as the initial starting point for coming up with ideas.

It is a “Yes-Machine”

One major element to understand about GenAI in regard to writing is that it will do what you tell it. If you ask for feedback, it will provide feedback. If you ask GenAI to tell you all the things that are good about your writing, it will do as asked. This is not to negate that GenAI does have helpful feedback that it can and will provide. But this is to caution about overreliance on all the feedback from GenAI. You might get feedback that is not needed or you might receive excessive praise. Therefore, be discerning before implementing feedback from GenAI.

Trust your instinct or talk to someone throughout your writing process. Your writing process does not need to start and end with GenAI!