This hands-on workshop helps you develop personalized methods for using AI throughout the revising process—from reshaping arguments and logical structure to refining style and language. You will build your own prompts and reusable skills, practice critically assessing AI feedback, and apply these techniques to a piece of your own scientific writing. Discussions will address the epistemic demands of scientific writing (precision, hedging, claim calibration, reproducibility) as well as current AI policies at the university and in scientific publishing. Come prepared to share experiences with colleagues, experiment with tools, and leave with a revised draft and a workflow you can keep using.

The workshop will include input segments by the instructor, hands-on exercises, peer discussion, and live demos of prompts and tools by the participants. Between the sessions, you will apply the techniques to your own writing and prepare to share the results in the second meeting.

Please bring a laptop with access to an LLM chatbot (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT, Le Chat) and an AI writing assistant (e.g., LanguageTool, DeepL Write, Grammarly) of your choice. If possible, also select a text or a section of a text you would like to work on in the workshop.

In this workshop, you will: 

• identify and evaluate use cases for deploying AI legally and ethically;
• create personalized LLM prompts and skills for eliciting feedback on different phases of revising, from reorganizing the logical structure to copyediting and stylistic refinement;
• critically assess AI feedback against the epistemic demands of scientific writing (precision, hedging, claim calibration, reproducibility);
• apply these techniques to improve a piece of your own scientific writing.

Max 14 participants.
University of Basel PhD students of GSMHS, the Faculty of Medicine or Swiss TPH.

Dr. Anthony Mahler is an scientific copyeditor and writing coach at the University of Basel Language Center. He has contributed to various university AI initiatives, including the  2024 lecture series Academic Writing with Digital Tools and the 2025 SciLib Forum: AI Meets Scientific Writing.

Preparation:              5h
Course attendance:  5.25h 
Follow-up work:        5h
TOTAL:                       15.25h

no ECTS,
* Can be combined with another Academic Writing Course into one learning contract (total workload must be ca 30hrs) to receive 1 ECTS.

Currently registration is closed/not possible.