Writing an essay, or any literary work, can be very rewarding but exhaustive.
Whether it’s about writers or students, everyone faces writer’s block. It can be tough to break out of it. Thankfully, AI technology today can assist us in this task.
Generative AI, like ChatGPT, is capable of human-like conversations. You just enter a prompt, and the AI generates a response for it. Using ChatGPT sounds pretty simple, and it is, but it can simultaneously be a bit daunting, too.
The process of using it is straightforward, but the endless possibilities it offers make it tough to narrow down the best way to use it.
So, based on some digging and playing around, I will show you how to use ChatGPT to write an essay. I’ll be highlighting 7 secrets you can utilize right now.
Idea Generation
To write an essay about a topic, you must pick out the said topic. Brainstorming ideas can simultaneously be the most fun and grueling part of the writing process. Even in Essay writing assignments, usually, merely an idea is provided to you; you must pick out the topic from this idea.
Let’s assume you have been given an assignment to write an essay. The topic is “Write an essay about your personal philosophical theme.” What you need to do from here is construct a prompt for ChatGPT that includes all the vital information.
Once you offer ChatGPT with your idea, it will be able to analyze it and come up with topics in relation to it. As shown in the example below, it comes up with fairly decent ideas. I kept the prompt fairly straightforward, but you can go further and expand it as and when required.
Comprehension and Research
We shall continue with our philosophy theme here. Writing an essay about philosophy, or anything for that matter, requires much research. A deep understanding. That is precisely where AI and us humans are different.
The AI can do an unimaginable amount of research, technically speaking at least, within seconds; it merely states facts and figures. It lacks real comprehension and understanding. It imitates art, but it can’t create it.
However, AI can be used to enhance your understanding of a subject. It is one of the 7 secrets. You can use it to gather the information required to understand and comprehend any topic.
ChatGPT was trained using many web pages, scientific journals, books, and other forms of text data. As of the latest update by OpenAI, ChatGPT can now “surf the internet,” as we said back in the day, and get the latest and greatest stories and information.
This is of huge help to us as it can stay updated on any changes made recently and help increase accuracy. This accuracy is important to understand a subject truly.
Creating an Outline
A plan must be made to write a well-structured story. There must be an outline for your essay, a way to jot down the entire plot of the, so to speak, your story: conception to end.
It can be rather challenging to create this blueprint. It can be difficult to compress your idea to such an extent and then put it into words.
This is another place where ChatGPT can be just the friend you need. If you’re feeling inspired, asking ChatGPT to create an outline for your essay might help you break out of the always terrifying writer’s block.
I continued my conversation with ChatGPT and asked it to create an outline for one of the ideas it presented to me when we prompted it with our essay topic. I liked one of the ideas and wanted to see where the AI could take us with it.
Here is what I got:
I was impressed with how quickly it could divide everything into sub-sections, starting and finishing the story, creating a roadmap for you to follow again.
While this outline itself can be plenty, you can poke it to break it down further and ask the AI to let you know how to use it. It expands upon its previous response, providing a more detailed answer and guiding the offered information that can be best utilized in our essay.
Have it Write the Essay
I know that I expressed how using ChatGPT to write your essay for you isn’t recommended, and it is not. However, it’s not like you can’t take inspiration from its creation. Art breeds art, they say.
While ChatGPT lacks a real understanding of topics and works purely on facts and numbers, it can piece together an essay, upon request, that is somewhat passable if it were an easy exam.
The work generated by the AI lacks the human touch, as expected. It can often hallucinate and get things incorrect or not cite its sources. It simply generates the text that best fits the prompt’s request.
The work done is also considered plagiarized as the AI doesn’t create “original content” but merely creates a chimera of information available to it. Many institutes, publishing firms, and even open mics reject AI-generated content. So, it isn’t recommended that AI do your work for you.
That does not mean its creation is devoid of value. Its ability to create an essay within seconds, which tries its best to contain relevant information, can be incredibly helpful. You can take inspiration from this sample essay and get some ideas for your essay.
ChatGPT and I keep going, and I request a sample. Here is the response generated:
The good thing about contextual learning and the human-like AI model of ChatGPT is that you can speak to it like a person. From the context of our conversation, it automatically picked up on the context and created the sample essay from our chosen theme.
You can now examine, understand, and analyze this sample and extract any potentialities.
Writing Styles and the Nitty-Gritty
This part is where you can bring out the creative side of ChatGPT and yourself. Once you have your essay all jotted down and feel it lacks a little spark or could use some modifications, now’s the chance.
You can provide the essay in a prompt to ChatGPT and have it make your desired changes to any section.
For example, you can have it write a paragraph in a certain style or perhaps rewrite it for clarity. Not only can it make surface-level changes like that, but it can go deeper. The AI can make changes to the entire essay by modifying the tone of it or completely re-writing it in any author’s style.
However, for any professional work, that wouldn’t be recommended. If you’re working on something casual, it could be a fun experiment, if nothing else.
It can also provide you with templates or rewrite your source citations for you. I have always struggled with those, so this saves me a ton of time.
Proofreading
The essay will flow once your idea is decided on and the outline is created. Despite that, even once the essay is written, it is not done yet. Proofreading is the final step of creating any form of written work.
Personally, it is my least favorite part, but it is necessary for the sake of professionalism. You owe it to your work and your target audience.
Proofreading makes your essay, or any piece of literature, truly shine. As good as an idea may be, an essay with no structure, grammatical errors, and a lack of coherence and clarity will undeniably be lost in the wind.
Just like the rest, to use ChatGPT to proofread your work, you must simply come up with the appropriate prompt. A prompt should be direct and clear to the point, something like “Hey ChatGPT, here is my essay *insert essay here*. Proofread it.”
You can take this a step further and manually request ChatGPT to check for any grammatical errors and even check for the most up-to-date sources (if you are a ChatGPT Plus user. ChatGPT’s GPT-3, the model available for free, only harbors publicly available data up till January of 2022.)
Get Feedback
They say you look at something from all perspectives, and in modern times, we have the outrageous experience of having an AI judge our content creation abilities. Well, “judge” would be a stretch, but you get it.
ChatGPT is trained with an unfathomable amount of data, including essays, stories, poems, and more literary works.
ChatGPT lacks feelings and cannot have an opinion on your creation, but it can provide you feedback using its pattern-based approach. While the opinion of an expert author would be held in higher regard by some, AI is a great tool to get instant feedback as it analyzes your essay’s grammar, clarity, and writing style and gives some solid advice.
You can request feedback on certain aspects of your essay, or it is entirely up to you.
Things to Keep in Mind When Using ChatGPT for Essay Writing
ChatGPT can write an essay for you, but passing off AI-generated content is no longer viable. AI-generated content is very controversial. AI is not accepted for publishing firms, be it for newspapers, articles, or scripts.
In educational institutions, the usage of AI is banned. ChatGPT or any generative AI is not the replacement of a person. The essays they may write cannot be used as is, as most outlets do not accept them.
Plagiarism and AI detectors can easily determine if a piece of content is written by a human. So, unfortunately, asking ChatGPT to write an essay for you wouldn’t be something I recommend, despite how tempting it might seem.
Ethically speaking, to pass off the work of AI as your own is considered dishonest and can lead to some major issues.
However, adding your mix to it and making it unique is definitely within the “acceptable” scale.
Like any other tool, ChatGPT isn’t perfect. It tends to hallucinate. In the context of AI, hallucinating means the habit of AI to generate outputs that may not always be accurate but merely seem that way.
Checking citations/sources and grammar in the final draft is highly recommended.
Closing Thoughts
AI is just another tool, and the purpose of a tool is to assist you in achieving your goal faster. The key to writing an impressive essay would be to utilize this tool to its fullest potential.
The AI secrets mentioned in this post should help you write and break down any walls you may run into. Pair up the capabilities of ChatGPT with your creativity and hard work and forge the perfect essay.