How to Make ChatGPT Your Personal Writing Coach (3 Easy Tricks)

And a happy Academic Valentine’s Day to you. Here is my contribution to your academic Valentine for today:

Okay, jokes aside. Today, I want to give you some highly actionable tips about using ChatGPT effectively in your academic editing work. If you’ve not heard about ChatGPT, you’ve probably been living under a rock for the last couple of months. It has taken the Internet by storm and received a $10 billion investment from Microsoft (and now powers the new Bing; who knew that Bing would have a moment in 2023 where it’s cooler than Google?). It’s like virtual oil right now. Everyone is talking about it or creating content about it, so I am, too. Shocking. I know. I talked about some of this yesterday, for which I managed to deep-fake myself (not quite to Deep Tom Cruise levels, but still impressive how easy it was). If you are interested in watching the highly creepy result of that experiment, here is the video:

For the rest of this article, I will assume that you know what ChatGPT is or can use your Google-Fu skills to find out how to get access (yes, it’s still free, if you don’t mind slow). Today, I want to do 3 things:

1. Explain to you what a ChatGPT Mega Prompt is.
2. Demonstrate several strategies I use for rewriting your article paragraphs with ChatGPT.
3. Show you a prompt to generate a humanities-style argument for your paper.

Let’s dive in.

ChatGPT Mega Prompts

This is a concept that I learned from Rob Lennon, who has been tinkering quite a bit with ChatGPT. Much of this is inspired by his prompting tips. The idea behind it is that ChatGPT gets better the more precisely you prompt it. Really, it’s all about the prompt (crazy enough, there is a marketplace on PromptBase where people sell prompts for real money).

So, what’s a Mega Prompt then? It gives the AI enough information to give you answers that are the most accurate. Here is the structure:

Here is the example prompt that I created with this in mind (don’t sell it, but feel free to adjust and use it for your purposes):

Obviously, you can adjust the fields as you like and even the university (I figured Ivy League is probably good, but you might know a particular lighthouse in your field that is better suited for your prompt).

What I'm doing here is basically copying a couple of highly desirable items from professor job ads with the knowledge and skills that universities would like professors to have, so it's not a bad idea to put them all together, I figured. The more precise, the better for ChatGPT. Obviously, you can add and remove to your liking here:

Obviously, I went a bit nuts here on all the desirable traits, but many of these can be found with Google or simply by asking ChatGPT: What are the most desirable traits of a [your field] professor? And then, you can throw those in there.

This is always the most difficult part for me to write. It requires quite a bit of thinking (and, of course, you can also just omit it), and it is individual for the task you want ChatGPT to do. Definitely, don't copy this but adjust it based on the steps to accomplish your task or leave it out.

Again, this is a super simple task, but this could easily be something more complicated, such as: write an argumentative essay about the ethical implications of AI or something similar. Make sure your persona and skills match the task. I usually work with the professor persona because I need to accomplish professor things. Your mileage may vary.

This is actually my next tip below, which I find super important for ChatGPT: to provide guidance for how to write the output (voice and tone descriptions are immensely powerful and will change the output of ChatGPT significantly). I like removing pre Your constraints can, of course, be many other things as well.

Again, this depends on your task description, but I like the goal to tend towards something actionable for the audience, but really think a bit here about what your audience needs.

Many people don’t do this, but it’s super helpful for structuring the output of your ChatGPT answers in a way that makes it easy to copy them over into your writing application. For me, the easiest format is always Markdown.

That’s it. There is your mega prompt. Feel free to tinker with it and adjust it according to your needs. But really, this is one of the big secrets of getting better ChatGPT answers: providing all of the necessary context and precision for ChatGPT to work.

Rewriting Article Paragraphs

So, when I feed ChatGPT some of my writing (usually only a couple of paragraphs at a time), I can do this either with a mega prompt, but often the persona “act as” hack does the trick to prep the language model for what type of reply I am looking for. One of my favourite personas for rewriting things is “Act as a professional copy editor with 50 years of technical writing experience and a PhD in English literature” because why not. So, that’s what I preface my prompt with.

Then, I finish my prompt with:

I have to be honest about that last one, I don’t care much for rhetorical questions, so I really don’t actually like using them much in my writing, but I know some colleagues, who really dig this for their papers. Either way, this should get you going and make your writing smoother for academic papers. If I write for social media, I usually exchange those strategies for something like “write at fifth-grade level with simple language that is clear to understand and lean toward using shorter sentences without any jargon.” This works wonders for the output you will receive.

Writing an Argumentation for Your Essay

I should say that I am not a professor of humanities. A lot of what I write is clearly about science. That's why I find it so interesting that ChatGPT could help me build (even if only in a basic way) the structure of an argument you find in humanities papers.

Here is a prompt you can try for that if you are looking to get your first argument done on a topic of interest:

Of course, there are many other ways that ChatGPT can help you brainstorm arguments and topics, but this is a nice way to draft an argument that you can then deepen in future drafts.

🫶 I hope this newsletter edition was useful to you. If you enjoy this writing newsletter, please forward this email to a friend or a person who you think would benefit from such tips.