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Using AI for Library Research

Communicating Your Research

This is the last step of the UCL research process. The first step in communicating your research is writing your paper. AI can assist you by helping you write clear and focused text.


There are various AI writing tools that can assess your work and offer suggestions on grammar, style, word choice and more.  These tools can also help develop your ideas as you write.

These tools are powerful, but they can also make mistakes. Their use should be similar to asking a friend to check your writing. The AI will not always make the best choice, so you have to be an active participant in editing your work.


Tools:

 

One popular tool for writing assistance is Grammarly. It offers a free version and a pro version. The free version offers a good selection of features to help improve your text.

 

Prompt:
 

Uploading your text or document into Grammerly will be the most common way to use this tool. Grammerly will analyze your writing and offer tips on grammar, vocabulary and organization. No prompts are needed for this feature, in fact the software will prompt you asking what changes you would like.
 

There is a "Generative AI" feature that can create many types of text and documents just like many common AI LLMs. It can create sentences and paragraphs or whole documents. You can ask for a blog post, business letter, research paper or just about any format. You can set the tone of the text and aks it to include elements like bullet points or outlines.


 

Notes:
 

Following the Prompting Tips link at the end of this document can help you use the generative AI functionality in Grammerly.