How AI Can Help Students Improve Their Academic Writing Skills

Academic writing is an essential skill for every student. But students often find it challenging to master this skill because they don’t have the required resources.

In fact, research shows that nearly 71% of students have admitted that academic writing is a challenging endeavor. So, if you are one of those students, this blog post is for you.

Here, we’ll discuss how students can use the assistance of Artificial Intelligence to improve their academic writing skills. We’ll use examples here to increase the understanding of our discussion.

What Can AI Do to Help Students Improve Their Academic Writing?

Artificial Intelligence can improve the academic writing skills of students in different ways. For instance, students can learn to write in a formal, clear, and grammatically-correct manner with the help of AI. But besides, Artificial Intelligence can assist students in building a better vocabulary. So, let’s get into the details of all these claims.

1.     Bring Clarity to Content

Clarity is one of the significant fortes of a top-notch writing piece. That’s because if a writing piece lacks clarity and doesn’t make sense, it won’t be easy to follow. And teachers will have a hard time understanding such a writing piece. That is why it’s essential to write content with better clarity. So, let’s see how Artificial Intelligence can help you with that.

AI takes assistance from its sub-branch named Natural Language Processing (NLP). This sub-branch assists AI in understanding the human text. So, with the help of this branch, AI can analyze and understand complex sentences. And based on its learning through machine learning models, AI can improve those complexities and increase content clarity. However, let’s understand this more through an example.

Here, we’ll use the following text sample:

As you can see in this image, the text sample contains a long subordinate clause (‘that the new drug showed promise in preclinical trials’) that interrupts the main clause (‘it failed to demonstrate efficacy in the final stage of clinical trials’).

You can rephrase it either manually or by taking help from online rephrasing tools. For instance, we are going to use Rephrase.info (a leading rephrasing tool in the market). While rephrasing the above sample text, we have got the below results:

As the above picture demonstrates, the ‘Paraphrased Text’ looks clearer and simpler. So, that’s how students can rephrase information with the help of AI tools and bring more clarity to their academic content.

2.     Improve Writing Tone

A formal writing tone is essential for writing content in academic settings. However, students are mostly unfamiliar with the ins and outs of formal writing styles, which is one of the primary reasons for their failure in academic writing. So, if you are one of those students, you can use AI to your advantage. However, let’s see how.

When assisting people in writing, AI works alongside machine-learning language models. In fact, one of the most popular ML language models used by AI tools is GPT-3. This model allows AI tools to work like human writers because its developers have trained it on the writing styles of actual human writers. So, students can use such an AI tool to convert their content into a formal writing style. However, let’s elaborate on this more through an example:

Here, we’ll use a text sample written in an informal writing tone:

Let’s paraphrase this sample’s writing tone with an AI tool. For instance, we are going to use Paraphraseonline.io (a popular tool for accurate paraphrasing). While paraphrasing the sample text with this online tool we have got the below results:

As the above result indicates, the selected tone has modified the writing style of the text sample from informal to formal. So, that’s how students can use an AI tool to improve their writing tone according to academic settings.

3.     Build Better Vocabulary

A writing piece’s redundant vocabulary is another major reason for its low quality. In fact, using redundant vocabulary is another primary reason why most students fail to write academic content, as they don’t know any appropriate words. However, AI can help you solve this issue. So, let’s see how.

Besides using advanced algorithms, the AI-powered online tools that assist in writing have an extensive database of words. So, they can use that database to find a suitable synonym or antonym for an excessively repeated word in the content. But how do such tools replace the words with their appropriate synonyms? Again, the assistance of NLP will come into play here.

Since AI tools take assistance from NLP to detect the context, they can use the detected context to insert a synonym or antonym for a word according to the situation. So, students can use this assistance of AI tools to improve their vocabulary. However, let’s see how all of this practically happens.

Consider a text sample with redundant vocabulary:

Let’s run this sample into an AI tool. For this example, we are going to use Wordtune.com (best for sentence rewriting). So, upon running this text sample into the selected AI tool, we’ve got the following output:

As you can see, our chosen AI tool has replaced redundant phrases with useful words. So, that’s how students can use the assistance of Artificial Intelligence to build a better vocabulary.

4.     Rectify Grammatical Errors and Spelling Mistakes

Besides redundant vocabulary and less knowledge about formal writing style, grammar and spelling mistakes are other critical factors for students’ failure in academic writing. However, AI can help students in this regard as well. So, let’s see how.

AI-based grammar checkers can automatically detect grammar, punctuation, and common spelling mistakes. That’s because such tools work on the same principle (NLP) for understanding the text. And as far as the correction of errors is concerned, they use the same machine-learning language model (GPT-3). However, let’s elaborate on this more through an example.

Here, we’ll use a text sample containing grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes:

Let’s run this text sample into an AI-based writing assistant. For this example, we are going to use Grammarcheck.ai (reliable for automatically fixing grammar errors).

Upon running the specified text sample into the tool, we got the following output:

As you can see in this image, the tool has detected and corrected all the punctuation, grammar, and spelling mistakes. So, that’s how students can learn to rectify writing errors with the help of AI.

Conclusion

Artificial Intelligence has revolutionized the different aspects of life. And the study is one of them. Nowadays, students use Artificial Intelligence to learn to write grammatically correct content and add clarity to their writing. But besides helping them with writing, Artificial Intelligence can also assist in research.

So, AI can benefit students in various ways.

But it’s important to realize that Artificial Intelligence is not a substitute for human effort. That’s because while it may provide an easy way to accomplish complex tasks if students entirely rely on it, their creative thinking ability will get rusty. Therefore, it’s essential to use its assistance moderately.