By Santiago Gisler, 15 September 2026 

Clearly, I’ve become that grumpy old man waving a fist and yelling at the AI clouds. Whether my growing scepticism toward generative AI stems from a genuine, scientifically evaluated concern or just plain age remains debatable. I’d claim the former is true. But who am I to judge? We should let the evidence speak.

As generative AI tools increasingly creep into our everyday and professional lives, people naturally feel we should learn about large language models (LLMs) by implementing them; they claim we learn by doing. LLMs are a subset of generative AI that process and generate human-like language. Many scoff when I argue against using LLMs, especially when it comes to learning a new subject. These scoffers claim that students and professionals must learn how to use LLMs to develop skills and survive the future job market.

But isn’t learning to use LLMs to enhance our cognition putting the cart before the horse?

Regardless of whether LLM tools can realistically replace knowledge workers, many of us feel pressure to use these tools to meet tighter deadlines, diversify projects, or meet other job requirements. As a result, professionals and students have rapidly adopted LLMs and other generative AI tools in their work, especially amid the fear-mongering about AI replacing jobs.

The AI hype matters to professionals in fields that rely on critical thinking. Surely the rapid and ubiquitous adoption of LLMs in our daily and professional lives must affect our relationship with information; how we gather, analyse and disseminate it.

Our relationship with technology and LLMs

Humans have always criticized the impact that technology has on our cognitive abilities. Socrates criticized writing, Trithemius printing, and Nicholas Carr has written extensively about the effects of the internet on our thinking.

We may laugh at these objections today, having incorporated all of them into our daily lives. But even a vital process, such as writing things down, is a form of cognitive offloading, in which we rely on external tools to reduce cognitive load.

Cognitive offloading can help us focus on other tasks, sometimes more important or demanding. But it can also undermine our long-term thinking and memory. Let’s return to writing as an example: before we started writing things down, a person had to memorize an incredible amount of information before sharing it with others. In essence, being intellectually strong was an exercise of memory. We don’t need that anymore – at least not to the same extent.

Outsourcing critical thinking to LLMs

LLMs can be used as a cognitive offloading medium, like the pen, printer and internet, which can both support and undermine our cognitive engagement and skill development. How, then, do LLMs affect the higher-order cognitive skill known as critical thinking?

Much as the Swedish expression tells us that a loved child has many names (‘kärt barn har många namn’), critical thinking also has several definitions. For the sake of this article, let’s agree that critical thinking enables us to process information so that we can make reasonable, intellectually motivated decisions. It goes beyond acquiring, memorizing or using information.

Most of us have seen how users of these LLMs – sometimes ourselves – continuously offload not only their memory but also their analytical and creative thinking processes. This skewed delegation of thinking became especially obvious to me when I volunteered as a tutor for aspiring science communicators. As I corrected their summaries of a scientific article I’d assigned them, I discovered that more than one was beautifully, almost professionally written but contained closely related yet incorrect information.

This outcome should have been obvious from the start. If we don’t know the topic we ask LLMs to help us write about, we will struggle to identify hallucinations; after all, it reads like a professional piece of writing. The question is: how does ‘lazy’ LLM use affect our critical thinking in the long term?

One of the most cited studies evaluating the effect of LLM tools on critical thinking used a mixed-methods approach, yielding both quantitative survey data and qualitative findings from interviews with 666 participants. The study found a strong negative correlation between frequency of LLM use and critical thinking, with younger users most affected.

As with all research, we need to mind the nuances of the findings. We rarely see simple binary conclusions in any research, and that is also true about the cognitive impact of LLM use. Much like our other sources of cognitive offload, the effects depend on how we use them and the premises we adopt.

Some evidence indicates that users’ motivation and confidence can predict how cognitive offloading to LLMs correlates with critical thinking.

Self-reports from a university in China, for example, indicated that intrinsically motivated students, whose engagement was driven by interest and enjoyment, used LLMs as a thinking partner while maintaining cognitive agency. By contrast, extrinsically motivated students, motivated by external rewards or punishment, were more likely to use LLMs as a thinking replacement, without maintaining metacognitive oversight for genuine learning.

Another study on knowledge workers found that high confidence in LLMs correlated with less critical thinking, while high self-confidence correlated with more critical thinking. The authors noted that although LLMs may improve work efficiency, they hamper users’ cognitive relationship with the information at hand and create an overreliance on the tools. Rather than gathering information ourselves, we settle for verifying what the tool has already gathered; we limit ourselves to integrating digested content rather than solving problems; and we start supervising the tools rather than performing the tasks.

And that’s a creeping problem to which we can all fall victim. I’ll stick my neck out and suggest that our increasing exposure to these tools and the grandiose projections of their potential, spewed by certain tech giants, may be incentivizing greater confidence in them – maybe even overreliance. We cannot rely on our intrinsic motivation guiding our rational use of these tools. We all have to perform under pressure sometimes, perhaps with a motivating carrot in front of us or a stick threatening our tender backs. An innocent cognitive offload here and there can’t hurt, right? Especially if we’re the captains running the ship… right?

The LLMs’ homogenizing effects can make us – or break us

Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. We could argue that LLMs can somehow democratize information. In a world where English dominates academic and cultural propagation, LLMs can arguably help the dissemination of knowledge, especially for those with English as a second language.

We know that non-native English researchers spend significantly more time on every stage of communication, including reading, writing and sharing content. Non-native English-speaking women from low-income countries published up to 70% fewer English-language papers than male native English speakers from high-income countries.

Viewed this way, LLMs have the potential to democratize writing, levelling the playing field between more or less privileged parts of a population. They can also homogenize language, aligning voices until writers start to sound alike. As the Swedish saying goes: alike children play best together (‘lika barn leka bäst’), to shoehorn in my last Swedish expression for the piece.

However romantic that image may seem, the reality is that the written word, critical thinking, and, consequently, intellectual and societal progress also require diversity, disagreement and (brace yourselves) debate. That’s not to say we should resist the democratization of information access and the opportunity to disseminate it – on the contrary, it’s essential to democratize discourse. However, whether current LLMs are the proper vector for these initiatives is questionable.

LLMs can strengthen narratives and language at an individual level, perhaps making ideas more creative and satisfying. But the trend towards homogenization of language and ideas also has real-life consequences for intellectual and societal progress. LLM-generated texts are collectively less diverse in style, language and ideas. In other words, what makes our intellectual endeavours better individually also makes them worse collectively.

I’ve called this phenomenon a positive feedback loop – with a quantitative meaning to ‘positive’ – since ChatGPT’s launch. Our increasing cognitive offload to LLMs creates ever more machine-generated content, which fills the content landscape and, in turn, trains the next generation of LLMs. New, human outlier ideas, some insignificant, others paradigm-shifting, will eventually drown in an ever-expanding sea of LLM-trained LLMs or LLM-trained humans. Until…

We solve excessive LLM use with metacognition

One recurring theme seems to encapsulate a possible solution to the problem of reduced critical thinking stemming from cognitive offloading to LLMs (or generative AI, more generally): metacognitive training.

Some researchers argue that, rather than learning about the actual tools, we should learn to reflect on our thinking processes while using them. For example, at an individual level, knowledge professionals and students could explicitly question what cognitive work they offload, why they choose to offload it and how they will verify the tools’ outputs.

Remember how I questioned whether more LLM training wasn’t like putting the cart before the horse? That’s because study after study shows us that we can’t reduce LLMs’ cognitive effects by ‘just using them more’ – in fact, an overreliance on them worsens cognitive abilities.

From experience, I’ve seen that the most solid content comes from students and professionals who’ve taken the time to inform themselves about the specific topic or task. It allows them to think outside of the LLM-restricted box and colour their content with rough, yet vivid language and original, sometimes dissenting ideas. That’s what advances us as professionals and, before all, as social beings.

Sure, we could redesign models to include ‘cognitive forcing functions’, requiring LLM users to wait, interact or answer questions before seeing an output. But that depends on choices we don’t get to make – yet.

I believe in our cognitive integrity. Let’s stick with training that part for now. I’ll lower my fist now… though I’ll keep one eye on the clouds.

By Paula Arellano Geoffroy, 27 August 2026 

Editorial and communications consultant Sarah Fairman joined SENSE in May this year. She has a BA in Modern Languages (French, Russian and Spanish) and an MA in Russian and Eurasian Studies, and has been living in the Netherlands since 2017. I reached out to her and she was happy to introduce herself to our community.

I understand that you are British but have settled in The Hague. What made you move to the Netherlands?

I moved to the Netherlands to study because I’d heard that Leiden University had a good MA course in Russian and Eurasian Studies. The second reason was that I knew that after 2020 it would be a lot harder for a British national to move to a European Union country, so it was my last-ditch attempt to live abroad (although I had previously lived in Russia, Canada and Uzbekistan).

I always knew I wanted to stay in the Netherlands for a few years, but I didn’t expect to be here for nearly a decade!

How did you become a language professional? How many languages do you speak?

I have always been fascinated by language, and in all the jobs I had before becoming a professional editor, I was always the go-to person for copywriting and cleaning up texts. So I thought, why not do this full time?

After a contract finished as a Content Manager, I started my own business, No Nonsense Communications. At first, I worked as a freelance copywriter and English teacher (while waitressing!). Then, Expatica hired me full-time and I spent four happy years there while editing a cultural heritage magazine on the side. Now, I’ve gone full time as an editorial and communications consultant – I still write, but I focus more on the coaching, feedback and organization side.

If I’m showing off, I speak six languages. But if I’m being accurate, I speak three fluently (English, French and Dutch), another one well (Russian), and I can get by in two others (Ukrainian and Spanish). I haven’t decided which to learn next, but I do somehow find myself in a lot of situations in which speaking German would be handy.

What kind of projects do you enjoy the most?

There are two things I absolutely adore doing: one is telling people’s stories and the other is making difficult concepts easy to understand.

Recently, I edited a charity newspaper, which was a real highlight. I got to learn about different people who’d moved to the Netherlands – students, high-earners and refugees – and why they’d come here. It made me feel part of something, as I could recognize myself in their stories, but it was also fascinating to read how our experiences had differed.

Another current highlight is editing for a cybersecurity policy and analysis publication associated with a non-profit. I had some knowledge of the topic before I worked there, but in this role, I learn so much about it from experts who have spent years working on it. I feel so lucky to get to collaborate with them.

I love working in roles that are doing good, whether that’s raising awareness or providing solutions, so I also volunteer planning and creating content for a climate charity.

Do you have an opinion of AI and its impact in the language profession?

I have a lot of opinions, but I’ll try to keep it short.

If you can already do something well, AI can help you do it faster and on a larger scale; it can’t give you skills or judgement that you don’t have. In my work, I use it to speed up the spellchecking process and to find errors quickly. Everything in its output, I take with a grain of salt. I can do my job without it, so if a client would rather I didn’t use it, I’m happy to cut it out of the workflow.

While I’m not totally anti-AI, I do think it’s given a lot of people the idea that they can replace creatives. I’m also upset about the destruction of nature for data centres, the theft of creative work to power LLMs, and the gatekeeping of information by big tech companies.

I think it’s important to be aware of how the technology works and critical of the way it’s being used. Eschewing it completely isn’t the answer, but neither is hopping on board without question.

Do you read for pleasure as well? Have you read something interesting recently?

Yes, I read about 50 books a year and am in six book clubs! My favourite book that I read recently was ‘Piranesi’. It’s like ‘Backrooms’ crossed with ‘The Secret History’.

How did you learn about SENSE and why did you decide to join?

I think I came across it in a web search and I was super curious about it. I saw that there were lots of events and a community that’s passionate about language, so I’m looking forward to attending and meeting other members in person.

By Paula Arellano Geoffroy, 20 July 2026 

The European Commission offers free online resources for language professionals that can support your daily work. Here’s a little summary of them.  

eTranslation

eTranslation is the secure neural machine translation service of the European Union (EU). It covers 24 EU official languages. You can choose to work with general text, formal language, finance, law, intellectual property, or your own glossary. You will need to authenticate to access.

Translation memory

DGT-Translation Memory (DGT-TM) is the EU’s multilingual database of aligned sentences and their manually produced translations from EU law. It contains segments from the Acquis Communautaire, the body of European legislation.

IATE terminology database

IATE (Interactive Terminology for Europe) is the EU’s  terminology management system. It contains millions of terms that have been collected since 2004 in the 24 EU official languages. The database is constantly updated by translators and terminologists across the EU.

Knowledge Centre on Translation and Interpretation

The Knowledge Centre on Translation and Interpretation (KCTI) gathers, analyses and shares information about translation, interpreting and language technologies across the EU. It contains reports, studies, statistics, best practices and language policy, among others.

AI translation and language tools

The EU offers a hub of secure AI-based translation tools that are safe to use for translating and generating content in multiple languages. You will have to create an EU login account and register to use these tools. 

Resources for language teachers and educators

The EU offers many European resources for teachers and educators working with languages. These resources include teaching materials, methodology guidance, language assessments and initiatives for schools and teachers, among others.

Publications on translation and languages

This page displays the EU’s publications on translation and multilingualism, including magazines, materials for schools and researchers, and other publications for education and language.

By Claire Bacon, 30 June 2026 

Those of us who attended Nigel Harwood’s UniSIG talk on the use of AI in academic writing in March might be forgiven for feeling rather hopeless. It seems that university students are using generative AI (hereafter referred to as AI) with abandon in their university assignments and that we educators have no means of controlling or guiding this AI use. At the UniSIG meeting on 19 June, Dr Kate McIntyre challenged this hopelessness by emphasizing the need to educate students on the use of AI in scientific writing. In her role as scientific editor at the Department of Genetics at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), Kate is now teaching PhD students about the rules surrounding AI use, how AI works, and the risks and benefits it may have for their learning and work.

The rules surrounding AI use

In her lectures, Kate explains the rules for using AI set by the UMCG, by publishers, and by funders. At the UMCG, hospital employees must use official AI systems for personal, business-sensitive or company data. These systems are contracted by the hospital and do not use hospital data to train their models. Outside of this sphere, the rules soften a little, and Kate makes sure her students are aware of the relevant codes of conduct they should be following, e.g. with respect to information security and research. She also explains the legal reasons underlying these guidelines so that students understand why they should be following them.

Major publishers like Springer Nature recognized almost as soon as ChatGPT arrived that these tools cannot be acknowledged as authors because they cannot think and be held accountable for what they report. However, the rules on how authors can use AI and how they should report this use vary. Here, Kate hands the responsibility to her students and tells them to check the specific rules of the journal they are submitting to. She also points out the AI rules of the main funding agencies. For example, the Dutch Research Council (NWO) allows applicants to use AI to write grant applications, but does not allow reviewers to use AI when reviewing grants. Kate acknowledged that there is currently no real way to monitor this, but she can at least make her students aware of the rules and leave the decision to them.

Personal responsibility

In response to the AI use she has observed over the last two years, Kate also talks to her students about personal responsibility when using AI in their work and learning. She emphasizes that they are responsible for making sure that everything they write is correct and complete and that any mistakes or omissions cannot be blamed on AI. She also stresses they need to be honest and open with co-authors about their use of AI, and mentioned some cases in which students have damaged their professional reputation by not doing so. Growth and learning may also be affected by AI use, and Kate emphasizes that writing is a craft that you have to learn by doing. If you are relying too much on AI to do your writing, you may not be learning the skill sufficiently or developing your own unique writer’s voice. She ends by asking students if they can draw the line where tool use is preventing them from learning.

Risks and benefits

Kate is very open with the students about how AI tools can be helpful, for example, in basic copyediting, generating quick summaries and providing feedback on writing. However, she also emphasizes how AI can mislead the user. At the end of the day, these tools do not think, they simply predict the next word (or words) in a sentence – and these predictions are not always correct. For example, they can go off on a tangent and lead to hallucinations, or they can leave out important information because they cannot access it. They are also programmed to present information very confidently and can easily convince the user that what they are saying is true and important, which affects students’ writing. Kate always backs these points up with concrete examples of how relevant these risks are. One such example is an article in Nature emphasizing how AI chatbots are basing most of their output on the top 1% of most-cited articles. By pushing users to such a small proportion of available information, AI is clearly propagating hidden biases. Kate also stresses the more personal risks of AI for writing. For example, how it can alter meaning and that it cannot know the context and so place focus on the wrong points. She also challenges her students to think about how dependent they are on AI tools. If they rely too heavily on them for knowledge and language, they might not be able to have proper discussions about their work – or defend their thesis at the end of their PhD.

Impact on writing and publication

Kate also talks about the positive and negative changes she has seen in scientific writing since AI came on the scene. On the one hand, she has noticed that the level of English has improved considerably, with far fewer spelling and grammar mistakes. However, there has also been a considerable decline in proper citation practices. This not only includes hallucinated references but also students stating things as established information when they aren’t – largely because the AI model has confidently presented this as known information. Another problem is lack of external cohesion between paragraphs. Students are producing blocks of informational text but are not adding the narrative linking that shows the reader how this information is connected. A broader impact of AI on writing is text that sounds the same across many publications, which is having a wider impact on publication itself, and the overproduction of low-quality papers.

Food for thought

The good news is that Kate’s students are very responsive to her message. They understand the importance of the issue and want to have constructive discussions about it. They contribute thoughtful perspectives, some of which have even changed Kate’s mind on certain things! By popular demand, Kate now delivers her lecture twice a year and the students want this content to be made available to bachelor and masters students as well.

Kate finished by talking about how things are shifting yet again. AI tools are likely to become more expensive in the near future because the subsidization of costs by the companies in order to train models and gain customers is no longer economically feasible. There is also growing awareness that AI tools cannot be relied upon completely and that human oversight is needed. This is indeed good news for human editors and educators who value the effort needed to develop true writing skills. Much of the discussion after Kate’s talk centred around the importance of proper scientific writing training as well as training in AI literacy and responsible AI use. There seemed to be a general agreement that AI should not be used to simply generate text and that students need to be encouraged to develop their critical thinking skills.

By Mitchell Sandler and Anne Hodgkinson, 16 June 2026

Mitchell is a professional singer whose specialisms include Renaissance and baroque music. He recently had occasion to ask AI about a particular song. We thought the results were worth sharing with SENSE.

John Maynard’s ‘The XII Wonders of the World’ (1611) are solo songs accompanied by lute and viola da gamba (the latter, like a cello, would have played the bass accompaniment). Each piece describes a professional from the subject’s own point of view: the Courtier, the Lawyer, the Marchant (sic) and so forth. The poem texts, by Sir John Davies, had appeared as part of a clever dinnertime entertainment at a party in 1600. Each of twelve chargers had a poem underneath – only after finishing the meal could the plate be turned over and the poem read.

While preparing ‘The Lawyer’ for a concert, I read that each piece is meant to exemplify a personality as defined by the theory of humours. Each of the four humours (yellow gall, black gall, blood and phlegm) have three possible expressions: vegetative, sensory and rational. There’s nothing in Maynard’s score to explain which humour/expression is illustrated by which song. Perhaps one is meant to guess. Maybe that was the point of the game at that dinner party. My guess was that the Lawyer exemplified the rational expression of the phlegmatic: calm, meticulous, intellectual.

I mentioned this obscure collection of songs to a musicologist friend, who sought ChatGPT’s help in further explaining this repertoire. The results she shared were enlightening. What follows is a sample of what we learnt (AI’s comments in italics).

Can you tell me more about how the various personality types and the four humours were related in late-Renaissance England, and how Maynard might have portrayed those personalities and humours through his music? 

In late-Renaissance England, ideas about personality were deeply shaped by the ancient medical theory of the Four Humours, which remained influential well into the 16th and early 17th centuries. In The XII Wonders of the World (1611), John Maynard sets texts by Sir John Davies that describe twelve archetypal figures (e.g. the soldier, the lawyer, the lover, the divine). Each character reflects a distinct personality ‒ many of which align closely with humoral theory. Although Maynard doesn’t explicitly label humours, the musical characterization strongly suggests them. So when listening to The XII Wonders of the World, you’re not just hearing songs ‒ you’re hearing a kind of musical psychology, where each piece becomes a portrait of a human temperament as understood in Renaissance England.

When asked about The Lawyer specifically, ChatGPT says: the Lawyer is a mixed type, with both phlegmatic and choleric traits: clever, verbal, and strategic ‒ someone who persuades, parses language, and navigates complexity. If you want, I can pull out a specific line from The Lawyer and walk through how a singer might interpret it musically and rhetorically ‒ it’s especially fun if you’ve heard someone perform it.

My friend answers: ‘That would be great!’

A line often paraphrased from Sir John Davies’ text goes something like: ‘I wrangle, and by subtle sleight…’ Even if the exact wording differs in your edition, this captures the core idea: argument (wrangle), cleverness (subtle), strategy (sleight).

This all sounds plausible, but out here in the real world, those words aren’t in the song at all. Although ChatGPT has tried to cover that possibility by remarking that ‘the exact wording’ might differ in your edition, nothing even resembling this line is anywhere to be found in any of the twelve songs.

Nonetheless ChatGPT goes on to analyse how Maynard has set this hallucinated line, and how and why it so clearly illustrates the Lawyer’s personality.

Here’s the actual text of ‘The Lawyer’:

The Law my calling is; my robe, my tongue, my pen,

Wealth and opinion gaine, and make me judge of men.

The knowne dishonest cause I never did defend,

Nor spunne out sutes in length, but wisht and sought an end.

Nor counsaile did bewray, nor of both parties take,

Nor ever tooke I fee, for which I never spake.

Rather than delighting in cunning legal argument, the Lawyer is at pains to show that the good opinion he enjoys comes from his moral rectitude. All the conclusions drawn by ChatGPT are based on its own hallucinated text ‘I wrangle, and by subtle sleight…’

I thought it was time I had a chat with AI myself.

I asked AI mode in Google Search for the source of that line. I was told that it is from Samuel Daniel’s sonnet sequence Delia. Specifically sonnet 10.

Again, nowhere in this or any other of the Delia sonnets is there a line which resembles ‘I wrangle, and by subtle sleight…’

I mentioned to Google AI mode that I couldn’t find that line anywhere in the Delia poems. AI responded, encouragingly:

No, it’s good that you’re sceptical. In fact the line is from Nicholas Breton’s poem ‘A Quarrel with Love’. In the poem, the speaker describes his struggles with the deceptive nature of love, using the following context: I wrangle, and by subtle sleights, I find out many a way...

Having two lines now instead of just the one, I felt it might be possible to run the true author to ground. I told Google AI that I couldn’t find the quote anywhere in Breton’s poetry. This is the answer I got:

The phrase ‘I wrangle and by sleights I find out many a way’ is actually from the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney. It is part of a longer poem titled ‘A Farewell’... which was published in the famous Elizabethan anthology England’s Helicon (1600). The poem explores the deceptive and frustrating nature of love. Here is the relevant stanza where your quote appears:

Oft have I mused, but now at length I find,

The cause why Love is now so out of season:

It is because men’s hearts are so inclined

To follow will, and leave the rule of reason.

I wrangle and by sleights I find out many a way,

To make my fancy still on fancy’s object stay.

Is this fact or hallucination? If the latter, I would have to say it sounds convincing to me. It’s about love, while the real poem is about death. Sidney is fortunately one of the better-known Elizabethan poets, so there are plenty of online sources to check. Here, in fact, is how the poem in question actually begins (and there is no other stanza beginning ‘Oft have I mused…’):

Oft have I mused, but now at length I find

Why those that die, men say, ‘they do depart.’

‘Depart!’ A word so gentle, to my mind,

Weakly did seem to paint death’s ugly dart.

Here follow 24 lines of poetry. Needless to say, the ‘I wrangle’ line does not appear anywhere. The fact is that AI is never at a loss for an answer. You can ask AI not to hallucinate, and then you get more truthful answers (though based on what it finds online). I gave it free rein and here it has hallucinated a plausible Renaissance poem rather than come up short. Impressive!

So the conclusion has to be: if you need an answer that corresponds to reality, say so. If, on the other hand, you want something creative, allow AI to chatsplain and just make something up.

By Taylor Steed, 29 May 2026

When I got my Certificate in Editing, a large portion of the curriculum was focused on technology. How do you use editing tools in text processors? How do you interact with clients online? How can you use modern tools in your workflow? These skills are undoubtedly paramount to a successful career in editing. However, when I was hired to edit a novel last spring, I discovered a glaring hole in my training: how do you edit when your client’s idea of modern technology is a typewriter? This is my story of working with my favourite client, Mary.

The meeting

Our technological troubles began when our partnership did. We were located at opposite ends of the country, so correspondence was limited to the virtual variety. And so began the first hurdle. Video chats? Impossible. Mary didn’t own a camera. Email? Sporadic. They somehow kept disappearing from her inbox. And so our relationship became a series of phone calls, interspersed with long voicemails and voice notes, as we strove to identify a project plan. Mary printed our contract and mailed me the signed copy. Likewise, manuscripts, photographs and maps were sent via snail mail.

In and of itself, these were hardships hardly worth noting, especially given that we were both old enough to have once lived in a world where they were commonplace. Where their presence was felt was in the bottom line. Communication took far more time than expected, and timelines and budgets had to be adjusted to account for the postal system and the occasional lost letter.

The material

Mary provided me with several Word documents, each containing a separate section of her manuscript. My first task was to combine and organize the sections, ensuring I had the most up-to-date version of each part (spoiler: I did not). To ease Mary into the process, I used Word’s track changes to revise the first three chapters and sent them to Mary for review. I’m sure you’ve guessed where this is going.

Mary responded to my comments with unbridled and unorganized joy. To show her agreement with my changes, she either accepted the change, rejected the change, changed the font colour, or some combination of all three. If she disagreed with my revision, she took an identical approach. And she somehow hid the comment bubbles, which, to this day, we have been unable to get back.

In the spirit of insanity, I decided to try again. We went through a track changes training, and I provided Mary with a Word document of instructions. The results were no less enthusiastic and no more successful.

So we went back to the drawing board and found a solution that allowed Mary to give her feedback and me to preserve what little mental fortitude I still possessed. I gave her a document with track changes (comments were now in parenthesis and highlighted). Mary reviewed with pen and paper, and then we had a call in which she walked me through each change she contested and every question either of us had.

What started as the ultimate test in patience for both of us became one of my favourite parts of our project. So often, as editors, our discussions with authors are limited to one-sentence notes in the margins. Yet with Mary, I was able to gain deeper insights into her priorities and to help her bring added life to her anecdotes as she remembered details she’d forgotten while writing. We were also able to discuss how to make changes that enhanced the structure and flow of her book without losing her voice or message. At the end of the process (albeit far longer than I anticipated), we were able to create a final manuscript that Mary loved.

The manuscript

Did I mention that I was also hired to help her self-publish the book? Yes, I buried the lede. If you’ve ever self-published, you know that it can be a herculean task even when you understand the systems. More so when your author can’t find her Amazon password.

Knowing that neither Mary nor technology could be removed from this process, and having learnt from efforts thus far, Mary and I were prepared. She let me log into her accounts and, after a 20-minute patience-testing call in which Mary couldn’t find the one-time password once her phone notifications disappeared, I was in! With Mary’s blessing and overflowing relief that she didn’t have to do it herself, I was able to get the book published.

Once Mary was ecstatically clutching the first copy in her hands, I had one more task to complete. Amazon, unfortunately, doesn’t respond to phone calls as well as I do, and it certainly doesn’t take requests for author copies of books via snail mail. So I wrote instructions, full of links and screenshots, on how to order author copies and how to help others find her book online. And, of course, I still stay in touch with Mary every few months when she needs me to send the instructions again.

Whether it was the success after tireless perseverance, the reward of overcoming new challenges and learning new skills, or the infectiousness of Mary’s enthusiasm and love of life pouring through every phone call, this book became the project I am most proud of, even more so than my own published works. I am forever grateful for this project and that Mary trusted me to bring her words to the wider world.

However, in the spirit of honesty, I did make sure my next client could use Word.

By Linda Jayne Turner, 12 May 2026

Most people are afraid of public speaking to some extent. Mark Twain once said: ‘There are only two types of speakers in the world: the nervous and liars.’ Many speakers admit to feeling nervous, even experienced ones, and a healthy dose of adrenalin due to slight anxiety can help you give your best performance. There are, however, also ways to keep your nerves in check and the more you practise public speaking, the easier it gets and the more confident you will become over time.

Knowing your audience

First things first, you need to know your audience so you can tailor your presentation to meet their needs, ideally even before you prepare your talk or panel discussion. Try to find out as much information about them as possible at an early stage, such as what they want to get out of the session, their subject knowledge and their level of English or whatever language you’re presenting in. It also helps to arrive early on the day and chat to a few people beforehand, so you get a feel for who is in your audience. If you are unable to speak to the audience in advance, you can also ask a few questions at the start of your session to gauge their level of knowledge and interests. If possible, attend the other sessions so you don’t duplicate what previous speakers have said, and you might even be able to relate your presentation to theirs. Engaging with the audience is key and it’s a two-way process, so please also do your best to be a good audience member when you're attending someone else’s talk by listening actively, nodding and encouraging the speaker. When it’s your turn to speak, you’ll want this kind of support. As a member of the audience, perhaps you could also prepare some questions for the Q&A session while you are listening to a presentation.

Preparing and rehearsing

The importance of preparation and rehearsal cannot be stressed enough. Ensure your presentation has a clear purpose such as to inform, explain, persuade, or call to action. It is not advisable to write out a script and read it or learn it by heart but, rather, you should know your material well enough to speak naturally, with index cards as props if necessary. There are various ways to rehearse, either by recording yourself with video or audio and then reviewing to see where you could improve or, generally much better, rehearse in front of a trusted friend or colleague and get feedback from them. You should also time your presentation. Audiences love it when you finish on time and also, if you run over, you will either disrupt the event schedule or not have time to deliver the concluding parts of your presentation or answer any questions the audience may have. Anticipate possible questions for the Q&A at the end and prepare and practise your answers.

Set up early on the day and check in advance that all the technology works, including the computers. You should also practise using a microphone if you don’t use one regularly. This video shows how to hold a hand-held mic properly. Do a sound check in case any technical issues need to be solved before you begin speaking.

There are various techniques to help overcome last-minute nerves, such as doing breathing exercises before you begin. It is also a good idea to do a vocal warm-up to help you relax and avoid vocal fry (a creaky voice produced by low-frequency vibrations of the vocal cords). Here are some exercises you can do; a few minutes should suffice.

Projecting confidence

Experts claim that 93 percent of communication is non-verbal. It’s not just about what you say but how you say it and whether you appear nervous or confident and relaxed.

First, plan your outfit in advance. Dress smartly but comfortably; this can also make you feel more confident. And if you’re travelling to a conference, have a back-up outfit just in case of any mishaps along the way. Try to avoid fidgeting as this betrays nerves. You can, for instance, put up long hair so you won’t be tempted to keep pushing it back, and don’t wear jewellery that you tend to fiddle with. Keep your hands in a neutral position if not holding a microphone and only use them to gesture to help get your points across.

Use open body language. Don’t cross your arms or turn your back on the audience to read your slides or you will soon lose their attention. Eye contact is important. Look at the whole of the audience – not just to one side, although even experienced and effective speakers such as Margaret Thatcher have tended to look more to one side of the audience than the other (mostly towards the right). But you can focus on a handful of people in different sections of the audience. Don’t stand still in the middle of the stage for the entire presentation as this makes it difficult to connect with people on the far sides of the room. There are many videos on this subject such as 5 Body Language Tips for Your Next Speech by Brian Tracy.

General tips

For inspiration about public speaking styles, you can watch videos by renowned speakers such as Martin Luther King or Winston Churchill. Think about adopting some of the techniques that made their speeches effective, such as using rhetorical devices like repetition or the rule of three. A memorable example of this is Abraham Lincoln’s famous line from the Gettysburg Address: ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’. There are also some ways to lighten the tone during the performance, for instance, with the use of humour, but be careful not to overdo it. Be authentic and remember that the audience doesn’t know exactly what you plan to say, so if you forget something, they most likely won’t notice.

PowerPoint

Many speakers use PowerPoint. Beware of the pitfalls: reading your PowerPoint presentation out to your audience is a sure-fire way to lose their attention, particularly if you turn your back on them to look at the slides behind you. PowerPoint should only be used as an aid – and wisely. Jean-Luc Doumont, author of ‘Trees, Maps, and Theorems’, gave an excellent keynote on the subject at a conference I attended: Effective slides: design, construction, and use. One piece of advice he shared was that if you don’t have time to prepare a good PowerPoint presentation, it’s better not to use one at all. A group of students I taught at Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences in Germany conveyed their messages in their final presentation about public speaking by acting them out rather than using PowerPoint, and this was highly effective. Another sound piece of advice is to divide up the information on your slides to avoid having too much text on each one – and also take a printout of the slides with you in case the technology fails.

Speaking online

Particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, many presentations have been online. It can be more challenging to engage with your audience if you’re speaking online but it helps if you ask them to switch their cameras on – and their microphones off – if possible so you can at least see them and gauge their reactions.

As with presenting in person, dress smartly but comfortably, and also bear in mind that blocks of colour tend to come across better on camera than patterns, and ensure your outfit doesn’t clash with or blend in with your background. A virtual background can be useful if the room you are presenting in is cluttered as that can be distracting for the audience. As with presenting in person, do a sound check beforehand and test out the lighting too. For an excellent short guide on presenting online, read ‘How to Feel More Comfortable on Camera’ by Gillian Whitney (2023).

Other forms of public speaking

Another form of public speaking is participation in a panel discussion. This may be less stressful than giving a talk because the focus is not only on you. These sessions still need to be properly prepared but not completely scripted since the conversation needs to be natural. The same applies to podcasts.

Chairing a talk, moderating a panel or hosting a podcast are all forms of public speaking that require a particular set of skills. The moderator should support the speaker or help the panellists or guests shine. Their role is to ask questions and not dominate the discussion with their own opinions. A moderator or chair should agree with their speakers in advance on how they would like to be introduced, or whether they will introduce themselves. A podcast host should inform the guest in advance whether it will be audio only or audio-visual. As a guest, don’t be afraid to have some written reminders of things you want to say, for instance, if there is a particular point you want to make or resources or contact details you would like to share.

Conclusion

The more you practise, the more comfortable you will feel speaking and you might find you actually enjoy it or at least become less self-conscious. Make sure you know your audience and prepare as well as you can, including rehearsing, ideally with feedback from someone else. Practice makes perfect, or at least improves the performance, and it will also help with your confidence. Then, on the day, take some time to get into the zone and then relax and enjoy your presentation. Remember that you’ve been invited to speak because the organizers or host believe you have something important to say.

Linda Jayne Turner is an academic editor in the social sciences. She has been teaching at the International Project Week at Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences regularly since 2000, including courses on public speaking for students, lecturers and professors. In addition, she has taught public speaking at Charles University in Prague and at the International Business Week at the Business Management Faculty of Vilnius University of Applied Sciences. She also offers online coaching in public speaking.

By Paula Arellano Geoffroy, 28 April 2026

Translator, editor and interpreter Liz Cross became SENSE Chair a year ago in March 2025, and she has been balancing her duties with a hard-working schedule for the Society ever since. In the following interview she tells us how this year has been and how she perceives the future of the language profession will unfold.

I understand that you became a SENSE member at least a decade ago. Is this correct?  

I joined SENSE in 1999. I was going through the telephone directory, cold calling translation agencies for work. One of the numbers on my list was a SENSE member (I think it was David Alexander but it’s so long ago I’m not 100% sure anymore). He said that he had no work for me, but that I should join SENSE, as being a member had really helped him.

You have supported SENSE many times before, but last year you decided to volunteer for Chair. What prompted you to stand up? How has your experience been?

Sally Hill, the outgoing Chair, called me to say that there were two vacant Executive Committee (EC) positions: Chair and Treasurer. I’m not great with numbers, so being Treasurer was not an option. I gave the matter some thought and said yes when Sally called back a few days later. SENSE has been very good to me, and I wanted to give something back. More selfishly, I also thought that this might be a good opportunity to develop some new skills.

How have you balanced chairing and working on different projects?

One very positive thing about the past year is that I’ve been working with a lovely, cooperative EC and amazing Team Leaders. The lack of friction has made my life as Chair a lot easier. Some periods are busier than others, such as the run up to the Special General Meeting last November, and the recent AGM. One thing that has made it more difficult to combine work with being Chair is the fact that most of my work last year came from interpreting, rather than translating and editing. After missing out on an important assignment because it clashed with an EC meeting, I asked the other EC members if they would mind switching our EC meetings to the weekend, and I was very grateful when everyone agreed to this.

Have you felt a change in work demand last year?

When I agreed to become Chair in March 2025, my business had been a satisfying mix of translating, editing and interpreting work for over 20 years. I’d lost one translation client in January to ChatGPT, but the past few years had been very successful, so I wasn’t too worried. By September 2025, however, I felt as though my business had fallen off a cliff. I still have some valued translation and editing clients, and I am working on finding more. But in answer to your question, I have definitely noticed a change in work demand! I’m not sure if I should be admitting to this as Chair, but I know that I am not the only member of SENSE affected this way.

How do you perceive AI is changing the language profession in general? How is this affecting interpreting work in particular?

I’d like to start off by saying that AI is affecting a great deal more than just the language profession. It uses enormous amounts of energy, and it takes gargantuan amounts of water to cool the data centres. Having scraped and stolen the work of writers and translators from all over the internet, AI is now feeding off its own dubious content. In case you haven’t guessed, I’m not a huge fan. But what does this mean when we zoom in on our own industry? I can’t say too much yet about how AI will affect interpreting. Much of my work involves simultaneous interpreting for focus groups, and so far, AI has not worked out how to simultaneously translate groups of six to eight people chatting enthusiastically, while conveying the emotions behind their words. Nor does it liaise with clients and fill them in on anything they may not have understood. Things can change quickly though. There always used to be a note-taker at each focus group to type up the session in Dutch, but this job disappeared virtually overnight because of AI.

In uncertain times, organizations often serve as safe places for professionals to find resources, support, new opportunities and networking. Are you optimistic about the future? What can SENSE offer our members and the public?

I think that SENSE has many talented, inspiring members who are full of great ideas. I’m also aware that many members do not share my views on AI, and that whatever we think of AI, we can’t just ignore it and hope that it will go away. I think one way to help SENSE members would be to organize workshops on how to use it. We also want to organize marketing sessions. There are some very good resources out there, including trainers like Joe Lépine, who are helping translators to negotiate this shifting environment. I am cautiously optimistic that there is still a place for language professionals. Many members of SENSE are still thriving as translators and editors, while others have pivoted to new careers within the language industry, such as writing. I also felt encouraged recently when a friend told me that one of her clients had forbidden her to use AI when translating books. I would love to hear more from other members on how they are negotiating the changing language industry, as it is more important than ever to share our knowledge and experiences. At the end of the day, SENSE is run by volunteers, so we need more members to present workshops, and speak at our Special Interest Groups (SIGs). We need to pull together.

By Jasper Pauwels, 9 April 2026

In March, SENSE’s UniSIG was happy to welcome back Nigel Harwood, professor in Applied Linguistics at the University of Sheffield, who had kindly agreed to share his thoughts on academic writing and proofreading in this brave new world full of generative AI. Some SENSE members will remember Nigel’s previous talk about his research on proofreading student texts in the UK.

Research confirms what we already know

Nigel shared the findings of recent empirical research regarding students’ use of AI during their studies. Unsurprisingly, all research points in the same direction: the vast majority of students are using AI and for all kinds of purposes, from information searching and grammar checking to creating entire essays with minimum input from themselves. In addition, few of the students surveyed said that they knew their university’s stance on AI in education, and even fewer seemed to care about the potential harmful effects of AI use on their learning, the environment or even on the value of their degree.

What the Russell Group says on AI

The Russell Group, an association of 24 top UK research universities to which the University of Sheffield belongs, produced an AI policy document which turned out to be very positive about AI. The group considers generative AI a fact of life and believes that students should be prepared for using AI in an ethical and responsible way in their future workplaces.

The AI policy document formulates the following five principles for education:

1. Support students and staff to become AI literate.
2. Equip staff to support and guide students’ use of AI.
3. Incorporate ethical use of AI in teaching and learning.
4. Uphold rigour and academic integrity.
5. Share best AI practices.

On paper, this all sounds very promising. In reality, however, the policy leaves many important questions unanswered, including how Nigel, as a lecturer, is supposed to support his students and adapt his assessment methods to generative AI use. In fact, the policy does not provide specifics of what is to be considered ethical and responsible AI use. How academic staff members are to respond to unethical or unresponsible AI use remains equally unclear. Finally, Nigel also raised the valid question of whether universities should embrace such a rapidly evolving technology so quickly; maybe universities should take pause and do what universities do best, that is, thinking critically in order to reach a well-informed decision.

Nigel experienced firsthand how the rise of large language models (LLMs) resulted in his students, many of whom are not native speakers of English, suddenly handing in perfectly polished texts overnight, even though his course instructions clearly forbade the use of AI. Like many lecturers, Nigel is unsure how to deal with this kind of student behaviour, especially since the new AI policy does not provide helpful advice on fraud prevention. Returning to three-hour invigilated exams and introducing oral defences might be part of the solution, but it remains to be seen whether the Russell Group universities are willing to change their assessment methods so drastically in the light of their techno-optimism.

What about proofreading at universities?

After Nigel’s presentation, we discussed the implications for SENSE members as language professionals working in or for academia. At first glance, it would appear that proofreading by humans, or even academic writing as a skill, has now been rendered obsolete. A pessimist would argue that cheating and making your way through your degree with minimum effort has never been easier. It was argued that, thankfully, there are still plenty of good students who want to put in the work and actually learn something at university. One way to help those students is actually old-fashioned human proofreading.

Learning how to write well requires intellectual hard labour, and we agreed that professional proofreaders – or editors if you will – can help students develop their writing skills. Rather than fixing their mistakes for them – what any decent LLM can do nowadays – proofreaders can explain to the student why they made certain interventions or elaborate how the student can express their thoughts more precisely. This is not only instructive for the student but also showcases the added value of the language professional.

As one SENSE member eloquently put it, with educative proofreading, you can help students find their own voice. And I personally expect that finding your own voice as an academic author might make all the difference in a world full of uninspired AI articles. Some SENSE members confirmed that academic journals are facing a torrent of AI-generated submissions. Which also goes to show that taking the easy option is a more widespread problem in academia.

Although Nigel’s message was generally not an optimistic one, we found enough reasons during our meeting to believe that academic writing and proofreading is far from dead and buried.