This cheap motivational trick for writers sounds just like the sort of thing that’d work for me. Would work well for PhD writers too. Which reminds me, it’s about time I put my PhD thesis online. But, see, something’s weird with the Word file, so when I PDF it it becomes three separate PDFs, which the printer could handle, but which I keep meaning to splice or otherwise fix before putting it online. Only I never get around to it cos I don’t have Acrobat Distiller. Tut tut.


Discover more from Jill Walker Rettberg

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

3 thoughts on “motivate yourself!

  1. Clancy

    Hey, Jill, have you tried OpenOffice? I heard there are a few kinks when you run it on a Mac, but maybe it’s worth a try…it has a PDF button; click it and it saves a copy of your file in PDF.

  2. Jill

    I haven’t yet, no – I’ve been using the built-in OSX thing where you can print from anything and send it to a PDF file intstead of a printer. I’ll just, uh, do it later, I think… Thanks for the tip, though!

  3. Trond

    The Word doc is probably divided into three sections. Have you tried saving the whole shebang as web pages (there’s an option for this in Word)? It might be that it turns out to be some *very* long web pages, but still, it might be worth checking out.

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

AI STORIES

AI-generated stories have longer endings than human stories

My colleague Jessica Witte has just shared a preprint where she compared the emotional arcs of the stories we generated using gpt-4o-mini to those of human-authored (pre-2022) stories from the subreddit r/WritingPrompts, conveniently gathered in this dataset. She found a distinct difference in the endings of the LLM-generated stories: both […]

How to peer review a paper in 2026

Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist, wrote a useful list of what reviewers need to look out now that so many papers are bad science that looks good thanks to LLMs. Read her whole blog post, she explains it well, but here’s a brief version because I’m pretty sure we’ll be needing […]

“So what if it was ChatGPT? It *could* have been true!”

I recently read a good article on the different kinds of truth a language model operates with by Luke Mann, Liam Magee and Vanicka Arora, Truth Machines: Synthesizing Veracity in AI Language Models, but despite its lovely typology of truths (consensus, correspondence, coherence and pragmatic) it doesn’t help me with […]

AI STORIES

AI shimmer and sparkle

I have this hunch that sparkles and glow and shimmer are somehow a point in the latent spaces of LLMs that have more connections than you would expect. Perhaps their connotation to magic and to the unknown matches some of the mystique of genAI? Or perhaps these words are used […]

Don’t do a systematic review if you’re in the humanities

This paper is a great example of why you probably shouldn’t use a systematic literature review for a theoretical and conceptual research question like “How does artificial intelligence affect the perception of authenticity and aura in art?” However, if you’re looking for an annotated list of 48 recent articles about […]