How Technology is Transforming Academic Writing?

Gone are the days when students had to write on typewriters and had to go through a lot of trouble to correct one mistake. Because of the evolution of technology from supercomputers to smart AI writing assistants, research has become more fun than a stressful job. 

Though the increasing efficiency of technology is making academic writing easier for students, it also has negative effects that often go under the carpet due to its widespread advantages.

Positive Impacts of Technology on Academia

Let’s first dive into the fruits of smart devices and software like Grammarly, EndNote, etc., in order to better understand how technology has actually improved the overall research and writing experience of students and professionals. 

Access to More Knowledge

Around 50 years ago, there were no online libraries, and researchers had to spend days just finding relevant books and papers for citations. But now, at one click, you can access hundreds of libraries to find only relevant studies using the right keyword. 

Thanks to technology, you can also scan works written in different languages by using online translators. This means that the issue of searching and collecting relevant data is not a big deal now if you are familiar with the right practices. The sea of knowledge is waiting for you, and it’s up to you how much you benefit from it.

Ease of Shaping Narratives

Whether you are good at connecting sentences or not, it doesn’t matter now because there are dedicated writing assistants like Grammarly that can make you write better or clearer. All you need to do is run a check and get your verbs, pronouns, or sentence structuring errors corrected instantly. 

Allowing you to focus more on developing clear thoughts and narratives because technology can take care of your language errors. A few decades ago, people were deprived of this blessing, and they had to walk a very hard path to do research.

Protection of Academic Integrity

With the development of platforms like Turnitin, the chances of getting your plagiarised or AI-generated work passed are near impossible. Which means you can’t copy content from others and generate it from any generative writing tool to add to your literature review. 

Requiring students to remove plagiarism or AI using hacks or even by taking literature review writing help from experts. This reflects that technology is not only accelerating the academic writing process but also protecting academic integrity by detecting plagiarised or AI-generated works.

Easy Reference Management

No need to remember where the comma should be placed, whether the surname of the author comes first or the first name. Because tools like EndNote, Mendley, Zotero, etc, can help you manage the references according to your preferred citation style, such as MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, and so on.

Moreover, you can also generate instant citations using Scribbr, ResearchProspect, and Grammarly, as well as for in-text citations or a list of references. That’s how technology is complementing research writing by offering on-the-go solutions.

Negative Impacts of Technology on Academia

As there are some advantages of the evolution of technology, there are some disadvantages as well. We have mentioned the most common ones to understand how it is affecting the world of academia.

Students are Becoming More Lazy

Writing assistants and tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc, have made students lazy because they are overusing them and using their own skills less. For example, to write an abstract of the paper, instead of re-reading the manuscript, researchers are making the AI read the whole manuscript and write the abstract.

That they can do better because they have done the whole research, not the platform; moreover, sometimes overreliance on technology causes students to face objections about the use of AI in writing. 

Some institutes have a strict no-AI policy, and students have to use dissertation writing services to submit completely original solutions. Technology is risking the future of students by putting them in hot water due to its overuse.

Ethical Considerations are Getting Compromised

Prestigious institutions and even top-tier journals are now demanding that researchers clearly mention the use of AI to ensure transparency. Students are getting ideas or even papers from artificial intelligence and submitting them as their own, which is completely misleading and violates academic norms. That’s the central point where the efficiency of technology has hit academia harder.

Biased Studies are Being Published

Students who are using AI-based tools for their research are also unknowingly promoting biases or inaccurate data because AI is trained on limited data and not up to date with current changes or facts and figures. This makes students and researchers rely on incorrect or even biased data due to its limitations. 

Conclusion

Technology has undoubtedly improved the speed at which researchers produce papers by offering efficiency in every aspect, from data collection to data analysis. But it has compromised academic integrity as well by blurring the line between what’s specifically human and the tools’ contribution to the study.