Practical Tips on First Drafts for Essays when Using AI
Commentators always give another piece of advice when it comes to student writing. “Use AI to write a first draft!” This blog will provide practical advice on using AI to write a first draft. We don’t say “good first draft” or “excellent first draft.” Your first draft doesn’t need to be great. It needs to exist. Unlike a personal narrative essay, which we discussed in our previous blog, we will speak to a first draft for a typical college essay that requires research.
Step 1: Don’t Generate an entire First Draft using AI
The first piece of advice is basic, but you wouldn’t believe how many students get caught in this trap. Please don’t spend much time trying to make this draft perfect, and don’t use ChatGPT to write it for you. Your rough draft should be rough. You are better off writing something absolutely terrible and using ChatGPT as an assistant later. If you generate a total “first draft” using ChatGPT, you will probably violate your institution’s and educator’s AI honor code. The second part of this advice? Save your terrible, you-generated first draft somewhere to prove that you did it yourself.
Step 2: Make an outline you can fill in later
One way to do this very quickly is to look at the syllabus the instructor provided for your class and modify it into an outline for an essay. Generally, you will only be left with having to outline the conclusion since it starts with “Introduction” and then breaks it up into subject areas. However, since even educators are using AI to generate syllabi, you should run your syllabus through AI Detector Pro so you don’t accidentally integrate any of their AI content into your outline.
If you find evidence of AI in the syllabus, check in with the educator and ask specific questions about what you can and can’t do with AI for an essay, including having used their syllabus as a starting point for an outline. Don’t bother mentioning that you know they used AI, though. At AI Detector Pro, our fundamental position has always been that AI is a helpful tool, and it’s best to mention cordial relationships with educators.
Step 3: Writing the Paper
Research writing is elementary and follows the same style at any institution. You’ll start with a topic (usually assigned by your educator). You must formulate a thesis, gather data for the body of the paper to support your hypothesis, and then draw a conclusion. For an outline, you will usually note the data you need to support the hypothesis (this is important in step 4). We won’t spend much time on it in this blog. If you don’t have any experience in writing or this step confuses you, we recommend you contact your educator immediately and explain that you are confused. You may need to attend a preliminary writing course, or you might be able to get a tutor to assist you. Don’t turn in an AI paper. You will never learn how to write; it will catch up to you at some point.
Step 4: Confirm where you can use AI with your educator and institution. Get into specifics!
First, never ever use AI to write your hypothesis or conclusion. Using ChatGPT for the hypothesis and the conclusion is the biggest no-no. To form a hypothesis or state a conclusion, ask yourself what you think about the topic or review your class notes. What questions did you have? Did your professor give you any helpful data for those questions? What did your classmates ask about in class? What does your professor think?
Check in with your educator about whether you can use ChatGPT to research the data for your hypothesis. This data forms the body of the paper. Research is usually where educators are willing to be the most generous with student use of AI. Even then, they’ll primarily allow it to speed up finding a publication supporting your words, unless they want you to learn how to research. This is another issue you should clarify with your educator. Most educators want you to spend time on interpretation and analysis rather than rote research tasks.
Let’s see what an example of a first draft for a research paper would look like below.
Example of Research Paper Structure
Introduction to Topic.
- Hypothesis Statement
- Major Point Supporting Hypothesis
- Supporting Subpoint: (requires a citation)
- Supporting Subpoint: (requires a citation)
- Supporting Subpoint (requires a citation)
Then, you would do the same for every major point supporting your hypothesis. Again, if you are unfamiliar with writing like this, you must inform your educator and access institutional resources to avoid plagiarism and obtain a better grade.
Do you see a, b, and c? If your professor allows it, you can prompt ChatGPT to find a reputable article supporting that statement—one word of caution here. Re-Google what ChatGPT gives you because it fabricates data and articles.
Another word of caution: do not copy and paste whatever you generate from ChatGPT after your sub-point. Even how it writes about data or articles can trip an AI Detector. Ensure you cite the material using your institution’s preferred citation format. If you integrate ChatGPT content, you should follow original opinion statements or interpretive analysis. Also, run everything through AI Detector Pro and edit until you get a score of 2 (remember, we don’t hand out 0).