As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, it’s becoming increasingly useful in various aspects of our lives. Language models, particularly OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has seen significant advancements over the past few months.
It’s been proven to be capable of helping you complete a myriad of tasks – like managing your finances, generating business ideas, and so much more.
Among these advanced capabilities is ChatGPT’s ability to help you write an essay from scratch (from start to finish).
This blog post is intended to guide you through the basics, in the form of a step-by-step guide.
Step 1: Idea Generation.
First, before any of the real work begins, you’ll need to figure out what you’re writing about.
ChatGPT is pretty much the perfect tool to help you get started from a blank page.
Start with opening a new chat window in ChatGPT.
Simply tell it to help you generate ideas around your topic.
Example: You’re writing a thesis related to orca whales.
In this case, I’d ask ChatGPT something like; “you’re a marine biologist with an expertise in whales. Give me 5 interesting topics related to orca whales that I could write an essay about.”
By telling the LLM it’s role, it’ll spit out more specific content.
You can modify your search with changes like; “you’re a journalist with a keen interest in whales. Give me 5 interesting stories you’d recommend about orca whales”
The possibilities are endless (this will be a recurring theme throughout your journey of learning about A.I.).
Step 2: Prepare an outline
Now that you’ve got some ideas about what your content will be about, the next step is to come up with a rough structure for it.
ChatGPT is an amazing tool for creating essay outlines.
Simply start with a prompt such as; “you’re a college professor. Create an outline for essay with the topic: “migration patterns of orca whales in the northern hemisphere”. Structure the outline so that the essay will be easy to understand for a child.”
It’s really that simple!
Once you’ve got a hang of playing around with prompts and asking ChatGPT the right questions, your essay will probably already be nearly halfway done!
Step 3: Generating Content
You’ve got your topic.
You’ve created your outline. Next – it’s time to fill in the outline.
Start by slowly feeding your topic and outline into ChatGPT.
Example: As part of your outline, the first section of your essay will be a short overall introduction regarding the migration patterns of orca whales.
“Give me a short, one paragraph explanation about the migration patterns of orca whales. Provide 5 sources relating to the topic”
You can ask it questions, request suggestions, and even ask for sources. Remember, the more specific your input is, the higher the relevancy in the AI’s response.
Step 4: Refine and Organize
ChatGPT is great at spitting out information and organizing it, but you’ll likely want to add some effort into refining your content with a human eye.
Review your outline, content, sources, etc.
There’s actually a few great tools that are geared specifically towards helping you create copy – such as essays and articles.
Copy.ai is a great resource for generating topics, subtopics, outlines, and highly relevant content for your outline.
Head over to their website and navigate over to the ‘Blog Post Wizard’ – if you’ve already got your outline done, go ahead and feed it into the Blog Post Wizard and see what it comes up with!
Step 5: Edit, Proofread, and Source Checking
Once you’re further along on your essay, the last actionable “step” in learning how to make Chatgpt write an essay is the editing process.
ChatGPT is a great way to start the process.
For starters, you can simply copy and paste the text into ChatGPT and ask it to check for spelling error – or even change the tone of your essay from “professional” to “witty”, or from “friendly” to “sarcastic”.
It’s also a good idea to quickly search up the sources that ChatGPT gave you.
It’s unlikely to have sourcing errors, but it’s always a good idea to check for broken/updated links, as ChatGPT’s knowledge base (as of this time) ends September 2021.
Step 6: Final Revision and Seeking Feedback
Once you’re done editing and proofreading the essay, you should be nearing completion!
Hopefully you’ve found this method of content writing to be beneficial, it can really save you a ton of time once you’ve got it down.
During your final revision, it’s always a good idea to have someone else (preferably with some knowledge about the topic you’ve written about) look over your work.
You might find a fresh perspective to be quite helpful.
That concludes this basic overview on getting ChatGPT (and similar AI tools) to write your essay – be on the lookout for a coupon to our A.I. Toolkit Course, which offers a more in-depth look at content creation along with 7 other uses of A.I.
Found this article to be helpful? Have questions? Let us know in the comments below!
