AI, Uber-Textbooks, and Knowing Your Own Strengths

By Dave Harris

Is there is a danger that LLMs (or other AI) will create an “uber-textbook” using the work of individual authors, basically stealing the best of all the individual work of scholars for profit, while paying the authors nothing? This question came up in the November 6, 2024 TAA Conversation Circle on royalties, and I wanted to touch on it again, after writing a related piece this past spring.

The previous piece argued (1) that current AI is too limited to do good intellectual work, and, (2) regardless of the capability of AI, that it’s important to take one’s own interests, desires, and personal experience into account because writing and research are personally uplifting positive experiences worth having, even if you’re not necessarily selling your work.

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Egocentric Reading: Using Literature to Support Your Own Research

By Dave Harris

When we notice egocentrism, it is usually a bad thing: who likes the know-it-all who thinks only of themself? But lack of egocentrism is also bad: we need to know where we stand on issues; we need to trust our own knowledge enough to commit to projects and tasks, and to commit to words on the page. I want to emphasize the importance of egocentrism in reading as a crucial factor in using the research literature effectively, and how writing is an effective tool for building the right kind of egocentrism.

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Habit and the Love of Wisdom

By Dave Harris

As a writing coach, I focus on practice and the idea that, for any skilled activity, practice develops skill, and that no matter what our level of mastery, we always benefit from practicing the skill. In this context, “practice” means both small-scale, focused, repeatable, low-consequence activities to increase a skill that will serve their larger purpose (e.g., musicians practice scales to support their ability to play music, tennis players practicing serves to support their ability to compete effectively) or, at a larger scale, an entire career involving actual performance (e.g., a doctor’s medical practice, which has very real consequences for patients).

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Productivity and Confidence

By Dave Harris, PhD

The August 2024 TAA Conversation Circle on productivity reminded me of how much productivity depends on confidence. This insight can guide us: confidence can be built through practice. I offer some suggestions on building confidence, and thus productivity, through practice.

Degrees of self-confidence and behavior

Speaking generally, emotions shape our behavior: the optimist behaves as if things will work out, while the pessimist behaves as if things will not. Metaphorically speaking, the optimist will buy a lottery ticket, and the pessimist will not. The optimist submits a draft for publication, where the pessimist does not.

Self-confidence varies for each person, and, generally, the optimal degree of self-confidence lies between the extremes: too little self-confidence leads to paralysis; too much leads to arrogance and an inability to learn.  Ideally, a scholar has enough self-confidence to move forward with their projects and to present their work to others while also remaining open to correction when errors arise.

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Generative AI from a Writing Coach’s Perspective

By Dave Harris

Following last week’s conversation circle, I was thinking about the fear that AI may take our jobs. Professionally, as a writing coach, this struck me because fear is one of the great dangers to a writer. Personally, however, I’m not interested in using AI as a tool because I have my own ideas to explore and writing, teaching, and research all help me develop those ideas. My internal curiosity won’t disappear if some AI takes my job, nor will my need to find good ways to occupy my time. For those reasons, I will continue my work as a writing coach, teacher, and researcher.

If you have fears about AI taking your job, I want to encourage you to keep writing, teaching, and researching because it’s worth it. It’s worth it to keep writing because:

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Tips for anxious writers: Analyze feedback

Dealing with feedback can be difficult. If you’ve had your work rejected, it is particularly difficult to use the feedback you received effectively. Anxiety naturally runs high in such cases, and it’s not that rare for a writer struggling with anxiety to avoid dealing with feedback. But it is crucial to use feedback effectively: the feedback we receive is the best guide to how to improve our work and get it accepted. In this post, I want to suggest a plan for dealing with feedback, along with some perspective that might help reduce some of the related anxiety.

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