3min chapter

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Mushtaq Bilal - Utilizing AI Tools for Effective Academic Writing

The MaML Podcast - Medicine & Machine Learning

CHAPTER

How to Write a Zero Draft

The aim is to put as many words as possible on the screen or on the page. The idea of a zero draft is to process your thoughts. So if you have a large massive text, say you have like 1000 words of zero drop with no structure, nothing, no punctuation. You take that and feed it into run it through chat GPT with this prompt. And within within seconds, you get a very decent presentable draft of your writing.

00:00
Speaker 1
Yeah, your aim is to put as many words as possible on the screen or on the page. And the idea of the zero draft is doing a zero draft is to process your thoughts. It's to, because, you know, you have thoughts, you have, you have things to say, but those things have to be distilled into prose, into readable prose. You know, and there are like several steps and stages to this distillation, like you will distill alcohol or, you know, you will make a beer or, you know, wine. So there are different stages and you can't really, you know, you can speed up the process, but you still have to follow the process. You can't skip a step. So free writing is something that I'm big fan of and I always do an exercise whenever I run a workshop. So you set a timer for like 25 minutes and then you free write for, you know, without without worrying about punctuation of grammar. And then you have a large massive, you know, birds, like 3000 words. And then, you know, the next stage is to clean it up or you have to do this, you do this for several weeks and then you'll have like hundreds of pages of zero drafts out of which not everything would be, you know, useful, but some of it will will be useful. And so cleaning it up is like you read them again. This is useful to read your own thoughts. But when chat GPT came along, I thought that, you know, this stage of the process of the writing process can be automated. This, you know, this labor, this academic labor could be outsourced to chat GPT. And that's why, you know, I've written it several times or Twitter and LinkedIn that, you know, don't outsource your thinking to chat GPT, but outsource your labor. Yeah. So if you have a large massive text, say you have like 1000 words of zero drop with no structure, nothing, no punctuation. And I've done this exercise myself and I do this exercise, you know, within my workshops. And you take that zero drop and you put it, feed it into run it through your chat through chat GPT with this prompt. So this is a prompt that I often use. I tell chat GPT, I prime it first, you know, it's like making an introduction. So I tell chat GPT that I'm going to give you a zero draft after free writing sample or free writing passage extract of my writing with no organization and blah, blah, blah. Will you be able to rewrite it for me with, you know, structure and organization? And then chat GPT says, of course, and then, then I feed it the, the zero writing draft with this prompt that please rewrite the following, please remove redundant words and phrases from the following passage and make it cohesive and coherent. And you know, and within within within a few seconds, you get a very decent presentable draft of your writing. So before chat GPT came along, I used to do it myself. And you know, this is how people used to teach others. And so this is this is one one aspect of academic writing where you have very low stakes, we just start writing very low stakes. And then you speed up the process very fast. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Yeah.

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