Build Your Own AI Writing and Thinking Assistant

Course abstract · by Sergueï Spetschinsky, PhD

Course content. Research is often a lonely endeavour. Yet, most researchers would love to have help in their work, be it for writing or thinking. In this course, you learn to build your very own personalised multipurpose academic helper, in the form of an AI assistant. It writes with you, attuned to your specific voice or following the broad academic writing style of your fields and specialisations, and helps you edit, translate and correct your texts, be it in English or another language. It also thinks with you, as a partner for ideation, brainstorming, structured feedback and review. You can give it specialised perspectives (your supervisor, the named members of a dissertation panel, a precise journal's editorial board, a methodological tradition, a school of thought) and use them as your standing readers and critics.

You learn to maintain and continuously improve your assistant, so that your system compounds with every error you catch. I bring the foundations: the instructions your assistant runs on and a writing skill I designed for academic writing, which you then personalise to you and your work. Most of the learning happens through building your own system, with your own pieces of writing.

Goals. You learn to:

• set up a baseline writing and thinking system I have designed, with a main instruction set and specialised projects;
• teach it to write like you, from a selected body of your own writing;
• edit, translate and correct your texts with it, in English or another language;
• use it as a thinking partner for ideation, brainstorming and structured feedback on the content of your writing, not just its form;
• set up readers and critics from the perspectives you choose, and use them to test your argument;
• manage what your assistant holds of your chapters, literature and sources, keeping it lean yet exhaustive;
• review its work and turn your corrections into a feedback loop that improves the system and personalises it further;
• judge which of its feedback to take in and which to leave aside, and when AI helps your writing and when it does not.

Format. Every course can take different shapes: in person, online or both, as one intensive block or spread over several weeks, shorter or longer. Length, format and all practical details are open: we agree them together, and I adapt the course to what your institution needs.

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