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ChatGPT is capable of doing many different things very well. One of the biggest standout features is its ability to compose all sorts of text within seconds, including songs, poems, bedtime stories, and essays.
The chatbot’s writing abilities are not only fun to experiment with but can help provide assistance with everyday tasks. Whether you are a student, a working professional, or just trying to get stuff done, we constantly take time to compose emails, texts, reports, and more. ChatGPT can help you claim some of that time back by helping you brainstorm and even compose any text you need.
How to use ChatGPT to write: Code | Excel formulas | Resumes | Cover letters
Contrary to popular belief, ChatGPT can do much more than write an essay for you from scratch (which would be considered plagiarism). A more useful way to use the chatbot is to have it guide your writing process.
Below, we show you how to use ChatGPT for both writing and assisting and include some other helpful writing tips.
How ChatGPT can help you write an essay
If you are looking to use ChatGPT to support or replace your writing, here are five different techniques to explore.
It is also worth noting before you get started that other AI chatbots can output the same results as ChatGPT or are even better, depending on your needs. For example, Copilot, Perplexity, and Gemini also have access to the internet and include footnotes linking back to the original source for all of their responses, making the chatbots solid alternatives if you rather skip out on ChatGPT.
Also: The best AI chatbots of 2024: ChatGPT and alternatives
Regardless of which AI chatbot you pick, you can use the tips below to get the most out of your prompts and AI assistance.
Before you start writing an essay, you need to flesh out the idea. When professors assign essays, they generally give students a prompt that gives them leeway for their own self-expression and analysis.
As a result, students have the task of finding the angle to approach the essay on their own. If you have written an essay recently, you know that finding the angle is often the trickiest part — and this is where ChatGPT can help.
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All you need to do is input the assignment topic, include as much detail as you’d like — such as what you’re thinking about covering — and let ChatGPT do the rest. For example, based on a paper prompt I had in college, I asked:
Can you help me come up with a topic idea for this assignment, “You will write a research paper or case study on a leadership topic of your choice.” I would like it to include Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Leadership Grid and possibly a historical figure.
Within seconds, the chatbot produced a response that provided me with the title of the essay, options of historical figures on which to focus my article, insight into what information I could include in my paper, and specific examples of a case study I could use.
Screenshot by Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
Once you have a solid topic, it’s time to start brainstorming what you actually want to include in the essay. To facilitate the writing process, I always create an outline, including all the different points I want to touch upon in my essay. However, the outline-writing process is usually tedious.
With ChatGPT, all you have to do is ask it to write the outline for you.
Using the topic that ChatGPT helped me generate in step one, I asked the chatbot to write me an outline by saying:
Can you create an outline for a paper, “Examining the Leadership Style of Abraham Lincoln through Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Leadership Grid.”
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After a few seconds, the chatbot produced a holistic outline divided into seven sections, with three points under each section.
This outline is thorough and can be condensed for a shorter essay or elaborated on for a longer paper. If you don’t like something or want to tweak the outline further, you can do so either manually or with more instructions to ChatGPT.
If you want ChatGPT to include links and sources throughout, you can ask it to and it will regenerate the answer using its web-browsing feature, further expediting your essay-writing process.
Screenshot by Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
Now that you know exactly what you want to write, it’s time to find reputable sources for your information. If you don’t know where to start, you can ask ChatGPT.
All you need to do is ask the AI to find sources for your essay topic. The biggest thing to remember is to include the type of source you want, whether it be web pages, books, PDFs, research, papers, etc.
Also: How to make ChatGPT provide sources and citations
The specifics are necessary because when you specify web pages, ChatGPT will activate the web browsing feature and include web links in its article. If you use a very general prompt, however, it will likely default to generating its answer from its database, which isn’t up to date.
For example, I asked the following:
“Examining the Leadership Style of Abraham Lincoln through Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Leadership Grid.”
The chatbot outputs links, accessible right at the top of the answer under the drop-down that says “Searched # of sites.” Then, within the response, it will answer your prompt conversationally, also including sources with site names and links in parathesis.
Screenshot by Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
It is worth noting that if you take the text directly from the chatbot and submit it, your work could be considered plagiarism since it is not your original work. As with any information taken from another source, text generated by an AI should be identified and credited to the chatbot in your work.
In most educational institutions, the penalties for plagiarism are severe, ranging from a failing grade to expulsion from the school. A better use of ChatGPT’s writing features would be to create a sample essay to guide your writing.
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If you still want ChatGPT to create an essay from scratch, enter the topic and the desired length. For example, I input the following text:
Can you write a five-paragraph essay on the topic, “Examining the Leadership Style of Abraham Lincoln through Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Leadership Grid.”
Within seconds, the chatbot gave the exact output I required: a coherent, five-paragraph essay on the topic. You could then use that text to guide your own writing.
At this point, it’s worth remembering how tools like ChatGPT work: they put words together in a form that they think is statistically valid, but they don’t know if what they are saying is true or accurate.
As a result, the output you receive might include invented facts, details, or other oddities. The output might be a useful starting point for your own work but don’t expect it to be entirely accurate, and always double-check the content.
Screenshot by Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
Once you’ve written your own essay, you can use ChatGPT’s advanced writing capabilities to edit the piece for you.
You can simply tell the chatbot what you want it to edit. For example, I asked ChatGPT to edit our five-paragraph essay for structure and grammar, but other options could have included flow, tone, and more.
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Once you ask the tool to edit your essay, it will prompt you to paste your text into the chatbot. ChatGPT will then output your essay with corrections made. This feature is particularly useful because ChatGPT edits your essay more thoroughly than a basic proofreading tool, as it goes beyond simply checking spelling.
You can also co-edit with the chatbot, asking it to review a specific paragraph or sentence and rewrite or fix the text for clarity. Personally, I find this feature very helpful.
