The golden order

Here is the habit that keeps your writing honest and still gets the benefit of AI: write your draft first, then use AI to edit it. Never the other way around.

When you write first, the ideas and words are yours. AI then polishes what already exists. When you let AI write first, you are just decorating someone else's text, and it shows.

Your draft can be rough. It can have bad grammar and clumsy sentences. That is fine. A messy draft in your own voice is worth far more than a smooth draft in a machine's voice.

The rest of this section is about editing your own writing well, not generating new writing.

Practice

Write one paragraph of your dissertation right now, rough and unedited, in your own words. Do not use AI yet. You will edit it in the next lessons.