Enhance Your Writing: Thesify for Student Success in Academic Writing
I’m excited about this software, specifically about the ways that it replicates the modes of writing feedback that a human instructor can offer. This carefully-calibrated site can engage with your work on a more complex level than a grammar or spelling checker. This is not correction software, but rather a toolkit for writing development that adapts to your individual writing style.
If you’re reading this, you’re presumably a motivated student who wants to get better at the craft of writing. As I say in an earlier blog post, I remain a believer in what we teach through assigning essays. Essays are a link to how academics have thought and written for hundreds of years; they’re connected to modes of argument that go back over a thousand. They offer you an opportunity to clarify your critical thinking: to argue via evidence, and also to analyse that evidence in detail. We learn to read faulty premises and deceptive practices in arguments by constructing our own. Critical writing emphasises and enhances skills desired by employers.
University-level writing is an initiation into the community of academic writers. All of your instructors will have had their writing evaluated the way yours is now being evaluated: through rounds of feedback, suggestions made to improve your work, which are then integrated into your writing, which then receives further rounds of feedback. AI models are tremendously patient, and available 24/7. Thesify, as a trained AI model, can give you feedback that otherwise might be difficult to obtain. Used over time, this feedback can help you develop as a writer. Like an actor getting off-book to really explore a part, it's once you clear certain relatively technical, even mechanical issues of writing that you really get to the good stuff of writing and discussing your ideas with your professors and other students.
How would I tell you to use this?
Revise your papers through targeted, precise instructions. Rather than give you rules in the abstract, as in an advice manual on academic writing, Thesify responds directly to your writing. Its examples and case studies are your own writing. The software can clarify what is meant by a comment like “discuss in more detail,” providing both a direct link to your own writing and targeted advice for how to improve it.
Supplement your instruction. Thesify should supplement office hours, student writing groups, and all of the other ways you work on improving your writing. For the motivated students who use it, Thesify can generate rounds of instruction whenever you need them. You can use these to polish your work in advance of sending it to others for further feedback—indeed, I hope it makes you a more confident writer.
Use Thesify to bring focused questions to your instructors. I genuinely think this software gives good answers on its own. But if Thesify points to a section you’re not sure how to improve, you could bring it as a writing problem to one of your instructors. As much as possible, don’t see this software as something you pursue on your own—think of it as part of the conversation you have around writing. Thesify lets you polish your writing before you bring it to an instructor, allowing you to maximise the value of your time with them.
Use Thesify to develop as a writer. Remember, essays are about cumulatively developing as a writer, rather than simply about slapping down problems and never thinking about the issue again. Notice what the software recommends that you do; find the patterns the things that appear multiple times, and begin to see them in your own self-revision. Understand Thesify as a safe space to present work: the tone is designed to be friendly, and of course what it offers is a zero-stakes report made to you alone.
Use Thesify to develop as a critical reader. The flip side of the last point: learning to develop as a writer, correcting the issues and tics in the ways we communicate, can also help us notice and help others with the tendencies in their writing. You’ll be a more effective—and, again, confident—reader of others’ writing once you learn, through examples drawn from your own work, about the issues that all writers face.
Use Thesify to support draft-writing and unstick blocks in writing. We all, as writers, stumble with blocks. An AI assistant is a fantastic tool for overcoming these. It can be the bit of leverage needed to push a problem forward. You can’t feed it just anything; but Thesify can help you move a completed draft towards being a polished draft. Writing can sometimes seem like a maze, with the way forward unclear. If concern about your writing is keeping you from making progress, Thesify has your back: it can generate reports, in positive language, that can point towards concrete areas of improvement.
Use Thesify to help with academic writing in a second language. Being functionally monolingual, my hat is off to you: writing in a second language at the very high level that university English demands is an impressive achievement. University-level writing in English demands a particular structure, as well as a particular approach to argument and the use of evidence. Some of this you can get from a textbook, and some will be provided by your institution. This software can dynamically put rules you have learned from other sources into action. You can ask it again and again for advice, and gradually but decisively improve.
Happy writing!