Humanities

On Writing Abstracts

Class Semester Instructor Department License
Superintelligence, Entrepreneurship, and Narrative Fall 2025 Heather Klemann English None

Learning Objectives

  1. Understand the benefits and limitations of using AI to summarize published scholarly arguments
  2. Practice writing “tiny texts” based on Kamler and Thomson’s book Writing for Peer Reviewed Journals

Overview

  1. Assign a scholarly article with an especially unwieldy abstract (see Foster, “Truth as Social Practice in the Digital Era: Iteration as Persuasion”) and provide instructions on how to write an abstract (ch. 3, “What’s the Contribution?” from Kamler and Thomson, Writing for Peer Reviewed Journals)
  2. Distribute assignment worksheet and allow students time in class and at home to complete the assignment
  3. Discuss in class which method (AI or Non-AI) students preferred

Reflections

It was helpful both in teaching students how to write abstracts and to discover how helpful/accurate they found AI’s abstract writing.

Tools

ChatGPT & Claude

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