AI as an Academic Writing Companion:

Prompting, Rhetoric and Research Writing

Abstract

This Teaching Practice paper documents and reflects on a workshop aiming to infuse rhetorical knowledge into Gen AI prompting. The workshop – “AI as an Academic Writing Companion” – is aimed at PhD candidates and academic faculty. It runs at a large Scandinavian university where English is a second language for most researchers, but is very much the expected language of academic publication.

It is easy to be dazzled by the superficial, sentence-level fluency of Generative AIs, especially if one is a novice researcher writing in a second language. This superficial fluency may obscure the AI’s lack of rhetorical principles, however: the AI may lack them, and the researcher may not know the AI lacks them. To combine academic literacy with a critical sense of the capabilities of AI chatbots, therefore, the workshop draws on Moxley’s idea of kairos-based prompting. The aim here is to develop and apply the rhetorical knowledge necessary to guide a bot’s responses; in this way, the workshop combines the needs of researchers for both traditional academic literacies and generative AI literacy.

The article describes the prompts and the pedagogy behind them, and our reflections on the development of the workshop.