You might be wondering, with AI, how can you use AI to help improve my college essays without making it sound like a robot wrote them for you? If that’s you, I’m going to share with you today some of the best prompts that you can use with ChatGPT to help improve your essays and how you can do so in a way that is ethical and that involves you using AI as a tool—just as a mathematician would use a calculator—as opposed to an author in your work.
I know there are a lot of students out there who may not have money for an essay coach, whose English teacher may be too overloaded to give them feedback on their college essays, or who genuinely want to try to edit their work and make it the best possible, but they might not know where to start. And AI is an amazing tool; it’s really jaw-droppingly awesome. But before I get started on how to harness this awesome tool, I want to give a few general tips.
First of all, my first tip is that not all schools are kosher with using AI. I do advocate that you follow whatever rules are in place for the schools that you’re into. Of all the schools that we contacted, we really only heard back from two of them with a meaningful response that made sense. One of them was Caltech, and I really loved what they had to say. Caltech basically said that you can use AI as a sounding board, but it shouldn’t be writing your papers for you. And one of their big tips, which is one of the first tips that I’m going to give you guys in terms of ethics in AI, is do not cut and paste. If you find yourself cutting and pasting, you’re probably relying too much on the AI and not enough on yourself. The second school that got back to us was Brown, and they basically said don’t use AI at all.
And then my second rule of thumb with ethics in AI is that I think it’s great to get suggestions from AI, but I want you to be the arbitrator. I want you to be making the decisions yourself. This is your essay. It’s your story. You should be making the choices in terms of how you tell that story. But AI certainly is going to be able to give you feedback, especially on things like grammar and style, and also help you mind your writing in ways that you may not perceive because you’re so close to it.
A few more general tips: Please do not feed your whole essay into AI. My best tip for working with these prompts is always to work in chunks, meaning that you’re putting in small segments of sentences, sometimes not even a whole sentence, sometimes just small groups of words, or paragraphs, probably at most. And I do paragraphs when we’re getting to some of these prompts that I’m going to get into. Second, as always, use your mind. If you want to elevate your writing, you’re going to have to do cutting, shaping, and rearranging. It’s going to give you some ideas. Probably whatever it pops out, the more words in a row it’s giving you, the less likely you should be to take all those words in a row. Finally, my biggest warning with AI is please do not let it dumb down your details. One of the biggest problems with AI writing is that it is constantly trying to middle whatever you put into it into this average of the internet. And ChatGPT might think this is good, but that is not what you want. You do not want average, you do not want middling, you want to stand out. And the details that you write are so critical to you standing out in this process and sounding human. So please do not let it kill your details; keep your details in there. In general, I am always bristling whenever it wants to try to rewrite stuff for me. I want to get its advice more than I want to get its rewrites. So that’s the attitude I’m going to go in with.
Use It As a Thesaurus
My number one prompt is: What’s another way to say…? Great prompt. ChatGPT in many ways is a thesaurus, basically, or you can use it like that. And it is the best thesaurus I’ve ever used in my life. You know when you want to think of a word, but you have five words and you can’t even think of one word. ChatGPT can take your five words and find the one word that means that thing. And it can be much faster than you sitting there with your brain trying to remember. My tip with this is don’t just ask for one alternative. Ask for a bunch. I like to ask for 30.
So, here’s a quick example. I said, “I’m particularly excited about studying abroad in Spain. How can I say this in 30 different ways?” So that’s the prompt that I entered. Now this is how I use this. I start reading through them. “I’m eager to immerse myself in the academic and cultural environment of Spain.” That sounds kind of good, but it also sounds a little bit stiff and maybe more snooty than I sound in the rest of my essay. So maybe tone-wise, I’m not a hundred percent sure. As I start to scroll down, I see something that looks different: “Studying in Spain is something I’ve been hoping for, and I’m so excited it’s becoming a reality.” I don’t know if it’s becoming a reality. I have to go to your school first and then do your Spain program. But here’s what I realized when I looked at this: this sentence inverted the word order. That’s great because I’m looking at the rest of my paragraph, and every sentence starts with an “I,” and I’m kind of sick of that. Studying in Spain is an experience that Stanford offers that I would be sure to take advantage of, so maybe that’s what I want to say. You can see how I can take an idea from ChatGPT; it spurs my brain, and then I’m going to write something. I don’t want to cut and paste. And though I like some of these sentences, they sound a little bit stiff. So I’m going to mix it up, and I’m going to make it sound like my voice. And when you’re making the choices, it’s still your writing, and it’s going to sound human. That’s what’s awesome about this tool. You can use it, but don’t make it do all the work for you. You do the work. You let it be the brain behind the scenes.
Find Repeated Words or Phrases
Okay, number two. One of the issues that I often find in college essays is that students tend to use the same words over and over and over again. “In particular” or “for example” are phrases that some students might like to use in every essay they’re writing, and it can get old. But oftentimes students aren’t even aware that they’re overusing particular phrases. This is one exception to the idea of always working in chunks. I sometimes will feed an entire application to ChatGPT and say, “Can you analyze my writing and tell me if I’m overusing any particular words?” If you’re saying, “I realized, I realized, I realized” across five of your essays and you throw them all into ChatGPT, it’s going to be able to identify that for you. There are also things on the internet you can Google called word frequency counters. You can also use those to do this process, but ChatGPT can do it as well. So, I’m looking for redundancies. Again, I’m using ChatGPT as a tool to help me analyze my writing because as a human being, the idea of going through my writing and circling words that are similar and reading it five times to try to find those similar words or trying to figure out how many times I said “realize” or how many times I said “understood” can be time-consuming. So, ChatGPT speeds up this process. Again, I want you to think of ChatGPT as a verbal calculator, not as a clone of your brain.
Find Overused Sentence Structures
Third prompt: one of the things that I find in student writing that can be problematic is they may overuse particular sentence structures. So having ChatGPT focused just on the idea of “Am I overusing any sentence structures?” can be really helpful. As an example, I wrote a little essay pretending that I was a student in Korea that played jazz piano. And so ChatGPT said that “interest” appears five times. Use synonyms like “pursuit,” “passion,” “activity,” or “endeavor” when repeating the idea. So now what I’m going to do is go back to my document, and I’m going to do a search for the word “interest.” And then I’m going to replace “interest” using my first prompt, which is “What’s another way to say ‘interest’ with appropriate synonyms?” Okay, so now we have sentence structure patterns.
Another thing it tells me is that most of my sentences follow a subject-verb-complement structure. This makes the tone approachable, but it can feel flat in longer essays. So the fix is I want to add variety with what we call introductory phrases. So, “despite my uncertainty,” “I kept practicing,” and “encouraged by my teacher” are participial phrases or complex clauses. So then what I can do is I can go back through my essay. I know I’ve used too many simple sentences. Go back through my essay and look where I can move a preposition as a general phrase to the beginning of the sentence. Where can I add a participial phrase at the beginning?
Isn’t this awesome? How you can use ChatGPT to coach you? For verb usage and tone, use more direct verbs for energy. Then, it says, “Would you like me to rewrite your essay with all of these fixes applied?” And you know what my answer is? No thanks. I don’t want ChatGPT to be rewriting my essay. I want to make the choices, but I want it to help me identify where I can make better choices.
Use It To Cut Things Down
The next way that I love to use ChatGPT is that it is helping me cut things down. A big problem that a lot of my students often encounter is that they write an essay, and by the time they finish, it’s 800 words, and it needs to be 650. Let’s talk about how we can have ChatGPT help us out with that. So what I’m going to do is I’m not going to actually dump the whole essay in it at once for this one. I’m just going to start, and I’m going to put a paragraph in. And I’m going to say, “I am writing an essay and want to cut about 10% in length without losing the meaning I’ve created. Could you help suggest places I could trim or use fewer words to the same effect?” It’s giving me a total revision, but I actually like the table better, because again, remember my ethics rule that I don’t want to cut and paste. But it tells you where you saved words and why. This is what’s interesting, and this is a lot of what I do as a consultant when we’re doing cutdowns; I identify areas where students can cut down.
As an example, for “Add another extracurricular interest to my life,” it says that I can cut the word interest. Another prompt you can do too is ask, “What are the words where I could use a contraction?” ChatGPT can tell you all the potential contractions, so if you only need to cut 10 words, you can use contractions, not change any meaning, and quickly cut down your essays.
Fix Grammar
The final prompt is a prompt about grammar and usage. The one thing that you can trust AI to do is tell you grammar. Ask, “Can you correct my grammar and usage in this essay? Please support all your suggestions and explain them.” And again, chunking is a good way to do this. Sometimes when you put in a little paragraph, it’s a little bit more accurate. When you ask ChatGPT, you can see how with a sentence it’s going to dig into the grammar. It’s going to tell a story. You can dig into it. Be part of this process, you guys. I hope you guys like this blog and that it was helpful!
