I prefer “post” for longer form, but this may be a distinction that is disappearing.
10.03.2026 19:20
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I prefer “post” for longer form, but this may be a distinction that is disappearing.
Or just “tweet”?
I also have a sign if you need to tap it.
james.grimmelmann.net/files/articl...
Engaging review of The Ordinal Society from the perspective of legal scholarship. (Jotwell seems like a great idea, too, btw.)
Dereferencing a null pointer definitely simplifies your code execution.
Truly, we live in an age of wonders.
www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/paper...
For what it’s worth, I think your abstract is better than the three LLM-generated ones. There might be bits you can borrow from them, and they introduce different useful details, but yours paints a clearer picture.
Some of the most talented people—artists, athletes, performers, and more—practice the most. Sometimes part of their talent is a keen eye for small nuances. They keep at it because they can see all of the minute ways in which they still have room to improve.
The spiraling shape will make you go insane.
www.404media.co/ai-psychosis...
I fear I may not be explaining this well. The abstract is like the statement of a theorem. The rest of the paper gives the motivation and the details of the proof. You want the abstract to be crystal-clear and precisely phrased because it is the thing you are trying to convince readers to believe.
Grammarly discovers that right of publicity is a thing.
This is in part a disciplinary difference. Abstracts do different work in a field where articles mostly report experimental results, quantitative data, mathematical proofs, etc.
A typical law-review article makes an argument. The abstract states the argument; the rest of the paper substantiates it.
Genderqueer Pride ✊ #genderqueer #pride #floppydiskart
Better to sit with them and help them work through the process of writing their own. Teach a person to fish etc.
Every time I teach a seminar, I spend an hour with my students collectively workshopping their abstract drafts.
Sometimes I write versions of the abstract at different stages of the overall writing process. It can be a flag I plant for myself, a way of taking stock, a straw man, or a tentative hypothesis. I write in dialogue with my own abstract, and I am done when the abstract describes the paper perfectly.
I care for their sake too. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
They will be worse at the job of knowledge production over time than someone who learns the craft by doing.
Less wrong than asking Claude first and cutting and pasting, more wrong than sticking with the "dull" abstract that accurately reflects their own considered understanding of their own article.
If there is one thing in a law-review article that calls out for "artisinal" production, it's the abstract.
Literally any other part of the research and writing process—the literature review, the citations, the summary of lines of cases, etc.—is a comparatively better candidate for delegation.
They're not lazy. Many of these scholars pulled repeated all-nighters when they were working at law firms, and they put in incredible amounts of work on their research—more billable hours than I do, I'm certain.
They're just making bad decisions about their scholarship. They have lost the plot.
When I made my Digital Property syllabus for this semester and scheduled Weinstein v. Islamic Republic of Iran for today, I had no idea it would be so unfortunately timely.
scholar.google.com/scholar_case...
Do the Thing The Malcolm Gladwell version of the 10,000-Hour Rule is a myth, but the underlying idea is obviously true. You get better at things by doing them, so do the things you want to get better at. If you want to be a better reader, read. If you want to be a better writer, write. If you want to be a better public speaker, speak in public. A few corollaries are less obvious. The first is the sports aphorism to practice like you play. If you spend your time doing something that is somewhat but not really like the skill you want to develop, you will end up with that and not with what you wanted. If you write small, incremental papers because anything more ambitious feels like too much of a risk, you will only get good at writing small, incremental papers. If you take shortcuts and read in a hurry, you will get good at taking shortcuts and reading in a hurry. You have to do the thing itself. The second is to embrace failure. Don’t expect to be good when you start doing something new. Do it anyway. Think of yourself as a beginning musician playing notes to see how they sound together, or a beginning artist mixing paints to see what colors result. Create things purely for yourself. Fail fast and fail often. Love your mistakes, and learn from them. Make a mess, clean it up! The only way out is through.
I can write good abstracts not because I have a natural talent for it but because I have spent twenty years consciously practicing it.
The only way to get good at something is to keep working through the part where you're not good at it … yet.
cf. james.grimmelmann.net/files/advice...
If it takes two days of agonizing, it is time well spent because the task needed two days of thought. Maybe you're making crucial wording choices. Maybe the abstract won't write because there is an underlying issue with the article. Maybe you haven't yet absorbed the elegance of your own argument.
If someone handed you an article without one, then I can definitely see why a *reader* might use generative AI to generate a competent abstract.
But if you get to the end of *writing* an article and can't write a better-than-competent abstract, something has gone very wrong.
Democratic politicians are greatly underestimating the size of the bag the next president will be left holding.
Asking an AI to write your abstract says to me that you are content to be a passenger on your own article, on your own career.
If it's not worth your time to write, it's not worth my time to read.
4/4
Writing the abstract is not an afterthought; the abstract is not some minor convenience for readers. It is the heart of your idea, the point of the entire process. Writing it is a form of discipline, a way of testing your own knowledge and emerging with something simple, memorable, and correct.
3/4
