Academic writing and Artificial Intelligence (AW&AI)

Number of participants: 

maximum 30 lecturers of the University of Trento, selected on a first-come, first-served basis. Research fellows and doctoral students can take part in the seminars if places are available.

The seminars offers an opportunity for lecturers of the University of Trento and experts to discuss the use of technological systems to support academic writing in English. 

Programme

8 January 2026, 16.30-18.30

Speaker: Alessandra Molino - online

The new landscape of Academic Writing with AI

This session analyses the academic writing process, examining where and how AI tools can effectively support it. Participants will explore a range of resources, including Gemini, Notebook LM, and machine translation tools, to understand their potential and limitations. The session will also address issues of authorship, focusing on responsible use of AI tools, by examining case studies and publishers' policies. Participants will be encouraged to discuss their experiences and to develop a personal code of conduct for integrating AI into their research writing practices.

15 January 2026, 16.30-18.30

Speaker: Laura Ferroglio - online

Prompting for academic drafting (1): Instructions, Ethical Prompts, Refinement 

This session explores the anatomy of an effective academic prompt, considering the factors of role, task, tone, context and constraints, and aims to understand how AI interprets instructions and the role of specificity and context. Ethical prompting is addressed next, showing how to avoid manipulative or misleading requests. Prompts will be refined towards increasingly accurate academic tone and voice. Participants will write and refine prompts and discover the criteria that best fit their academic needs.

22 January 2026, 16.30-18.30

Speaker: Laura Ferroglio - online

Prompting for academic drafting (2): Bias, Privacy, and Reliability 

In this session, participants will build on previous outputs and engage with AI tools to facilitate academic writing tasks. AI’s limitations are going to be addressed next, considering unreliable content and “hallucinations”, bias, and privacy issues. Participants will “challenge” AI tools through micro-tasks, devising a user protocol and cross-check strategies to detect unreliable or fabricated content.

29 January 2026, 16.30-18.30

Speaker: Nesrine Triki - online

Post-editing AI-Generated Text (1): Accuracy, Clarity, and Coherence 

This session introduces post-editing as a critical scholarly skill. Participants will be guided in transforming AI-generated drafts into accurate, coherent, and credible academic text. The session will use a combination of demonstration and guided practice that will help participants learn how to identify factual inaccuracies, logical inconsistencies, and stylistic weaknesses typical of AI outputs. 

5 February 2026, 16.30-18.30

Speaker: Nesrine Triki - online

Post-editing AI-Generated Text (2): Refinement, Voice, and Argumentation

Building on the previous session, this session will focus on higher-level revision techniques to enhance coherence, argument strength, and academic voice in AI-assisted writing. Participants will examine how to integrate AI suggestions while preserving disciplinary identity, rhetorical nuance, and personal style. Participants will develop strategies for harmonizing AI-assisted drafts with their scholarly intent and ensure the linguistic polish as well as the intellectual integrity in final manuscripts.

12 February 2026, 16.30-18.30

Speaker: Alessandra Molino - online

Reviewing the literature with AI 

This session explores how AI can enhance, accelerate, and critically, support the literature review process. Participants will experiment with the so-called “deep search” to identify relevant sources. They will also employ chatbots to generate and refine bibliographic entries in various reference styles, cross-checking for accuracy. Suggestions for using AI-assisted summarisation functions will be given, showing how to collect a corpus of studies to be used for this purpose with chatbots. All these tasks will be accompanied by awareness-raising discussions to critically evaluate reliability, traceability, and ethical use.

19 February 2026, 16.30-18.30

Speaker: Dominic Stewart - online

Introducing Sketch Engine

This session provides an introduction to the main functions of Sketch Engine, a corpus manager and text analysis software that allows those studying language behavior, for example lexicographers, translators and language learners, to search corpora using linguistically motivated queries. For non-native speakers of English it represents a useful way of moving beyond the circumscribed information present in dictionaries. The spotlight will be on Simple Query, Lemma Query, Phrase Query and Word Query in order to present the advantages and disadvantages of Sketch Engine, a sophisticated tool which requires not only know-how but also a degree of caution if it is to be adopted successfully.

26 February 2026, 16.30-18.30

Speaker: Andrea Binelli - online

Sketch Engine and AI

The first part of this session will focus on practical examples of how Sketch Engine resources can support non-native speakers of English in expressing concepts, translating and rephrasing in English academic writing. Special attention will be given to Word Sketch, Corpus Query Language and KWIC frequency lists. The latter part of the session will adopt a critical perspective on the effective integration of AI tools and Sketch Engine resources into academic writing. The strengths and limitations of such integration will be examined based on prior experiences with graduate students writing their dissertation.

13 March 2026

9.00-13.00 - In person

Speakers: Alessandra Molino, Nesrine Triki, Laura Ferroglio

Concluding Reflections on AI-Assisted Writing: Sharing Experiences and Future Directions 

In this concluding session, participants will actively share their experiences of using AI in academic writing, drawing on the insights and practices developed throughout the course. The session will also provide an opportunity to synthesize key themes from the previous sessions (prompting, post-editing, ethics, and tool use), and offer a chance for collective reflection and feedback on future applications and professional development in AI-assisted academic writing.

14.00-16.00 - In person

Speakers: Andrea Binelli, Dominic Stewart

Sketch Engine and AI: putting theory into practice 

In this final session, participants will have the opportunity to practise using the tools of Sketch Engine and AI outlined in the previous sessions. Subsequently, the strengths and limitations of such tools will be assessed.