Practical Tips for writing with ChatGPT

Educators advise students to use ChatGPT as an assistant for brainstorming or first drafts. However, no details are provided, making it difficult to understand how to put this guidance to use in the field. Here at AI Detector Pro, we wanted to break this advice into understandable tips so you don’t prompt AI with something like “Write me a 200-word paper on eagles,” because that’s definitely cheating. In this blog, we will go over how to use techniques like storyboarding to craft a great personal narrative.

So, how do you brainstorm with an AI? You can use some of the same steps you would use to brainstorm in real life, with yourself or a group of classmates, including storyboarding.

StoryBoard the Old-Fashioned Way. It’s easy.

AI Detector Pro recommends manually storyboarding with sticky notes because AI still has difficulty producing consistent sequential narratives. Loose threads and random details are easy giveaways for educators. Storyboarding your essay is an excellent way to create great content while using ChatGPT ethically during editing. Storyboarding is a fantastic option for narrative/personal essays about yourself because you won’t need ChatGPT as much as other techniques. However, just in case, you should to run your finished essay through an AI Detector.  

To start storyboarding, get big packs of sticky notes. Think about the story you want to tell in a narrative essay—like a formative experience or something about your background that makes you stand out. Write out quotes, relationships, and characters in your narrative. Write out names of who will be in your essay, like mother, father, teacher, soccer, etc. Create a sequential flow from start to finish, and think about how you want to begin.

Storyboarding doesn’t mean that you need to make pictures. You could write a single sentence, a name, or a quick memory. For example, let’s say you are writing an essay about your experiences teaching soccer in Costa Rica. The first sticky note should be the introduction, which links you to Costa Rica and soccer. Maybe you visited your grandparents there as a child. Your first sticky note could be “grandparents.” What happened after that? Did someone teach you to play soccer? Write that person’s name down and put it next to the sticky “grandparents.” What about after that? What did this person do for you? How did it lead to your annual trips to teach soccer in Costa Rica? Write down 2 to 3 more sticky notes explaining the meaning of these experiences to you personally and how you can help them contribute to your college.

Go in order till you conclude. Intersperse your sticky notes with emotions and memories. Ultimately, your sticky notes should flow in the sequential order below. Don’t worry about word count until you start editing. Get the narrative flow down first. Eventually, you should be left with a pile of sticky notes that will help you write the essay in the following order: Introduction –> Experiences –> Impacts and Important Learnings and Why They Matter.

Refining your First Draft with ChatGPT

A better use for ChatGPT is sentence revision. You can even prompt GPT as to whether or not you’ve created an understandable structure for the essay and what might be weak about it. If you use ChatGPT this way, you MUST run it through an AI Detection Program to ensure that you haven’t accidentally included detector-tripping verbiage.

If you have had trouble with a specific sentence, you can ask it for revision advice. You can ask how it would classify the tone of your writing. You can ask if the essay follows a readable structure and why. This is how to use AI as an assistant and helper rather than using it to do your work.

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