How to Write Prompts For AI Essays

We’ve given students numerous guides on how to construct effective essays in the past, breaking down the essential keys to making any piece of academic writing powerful.

Usually, these guides include using AI in order to enhance your own writing, but in this guide, I’m going to show users how they can generate the most effective essays from the most effective prompts.

Whether using AI tools like ChatGPT or undetectable chatbots, this guide will make those AI models generate the best writing to fit your needs.

Table of Contents

• The 4 Keys to Effective AI Prompts

• Persona

• Context

• Task

• Formatting

• More Tips for Using AI for Essays

• Conclusion

The 4 Keys to Effective AI Prompts

There are 4 ways to breakdown a good prompt to ensure the best ai outputs for any user, especially when it comes to writing you intend to submit, whether it’s for academia, marketing, email, or social media.

To examine each of these 4 elements with an example, here is a ChatGPT essay generated from a very basic writing prompt.

Make note of the generalities in the essay to see how they compare once we add more details.

Persona

When you ask your AI to write you an essay, you should include a general breakdown of yourself to better inform the AI chatbot how to write for you.

For instance, with specific details like: “I’m a fresh college student from Los Angeles that loves The Dodgers and movies and need to write an essay about why Los Angeles is the best city in the USA,” your AI system will give you content that feels more authentic to your voice and better addresses the academic goals of the essay.

The same goes for other forms of writing, need to email a teacher? Instead of asking the AI to write an email asking a department head to move classes, tell the AI you’re a student in a creative field that needs to change classes to fit your unique goals and needs as a creative.

Here's our new Persona-based prompt and the essay ChatGPT generated from it:

As you can see, more personal details resulted in different language used and ideas communicated.

Task

This refers to what kind of AI-generated content you’re asking your large language model to create. If you want an essay, giving it the more details about the category of essay and goals of the essay will ensure your output aligns with your professor's expectations.

So, instead of asking “Write me an essay about the fall of Rome for my history class”, you could ask it, “I’m a senior in college, write me an compare and contrast essay about the fall of Rome for my Advanced Western Civilization class including comparisons to other fallen empires and present day America”.

More specific tasks generate more specific outputs, and because each professor has a unique set of expectations from their a student’s writing, including these details into a prompt will customize your content creation to that professor.

The prompt and essay above shows how we gave more clarification on ChatGPT's task to write a specific kind of essay for us.

Context

Detailing how you want your AI to perform its task is the context of an AI prompt. So giving context to a prompt like “Write me an essay for history class” can then look like “Write me a poetic essay for history class filled with metaphor and make the case that understanding history is relative.”

Context is added to prompts to make your writing reach a target audience more effectively.

Above is our prompt with more context to the writing style in which we want our essay written.

Format

There are many different kinds of essays an academic institution might ask you for, especially when formatting bibliography. You can go as far as telling your AI you want a compare and contrast essay with seven body paragraphs if that’s what you need.

Tell your AI you want it to stick to an essay format that is tried and true including where a thesis belongs, where a hook should go, what each body paragraph should outline, where counter-arguments should be unpacked, and how a conclusion should read.

The screenshot above showcases an example of a prompt featuring numerous formatting guidelines that ChatGPT follows perfectly in its output.

More Tips For Using AI For Essays

Traditional Artificial intelligence algorithms are still not equipped for academic work because their machine learning doesn't capture authentic human writing style.

In order to make your work usable in an academic setting and have it bypass AI detection, students will need to employ undetectable AI writing software. The same goes for copywriters and digital marketers, you might not face expulsion but a search engine might derank you if your content gets flagged.

Even then, there are steps that can be taken to ensure your essays success and protection. These include using your essay as an AI template and then editing it to inject your writing style, experiences, and perspective.

Lastly, using AI as a spelling and grammar checker, or to give you feedback on your work is a powerful way to include AI into your writing process.

Conclusion

The best way to start reaching your academic writing’s full potential is learning how to write a good AI prompt. Prompt engineering sounds more complicated than it really is.

The secret to writing better prompts for your AI model and getting your desired outcomes is purely based on how many precise details you tell your AI about you, the task, and who you’re submitting it to.

When writing prompts for any generative AI tools, remember to tell the AI about yourself so it can determine how you sound. Tell it about the essay, so it can determine what its exact task is.

Give your AI all the details, so it knows how to write the essay for your class. And tell it about the formatting you need, so it knows how your essay should look.

From brainstorming, to coaching, ghostwriting, and more, there are so many use cases for AI in academic writing and digital marketing. AI writing tools optimize workflows for professional copywriters and lessen workloads for students.

Automation may still be a dirty word in academia, but if you can see far ahead enough into the future, you know its better to start using AI now than to be a beginner once everyone else is acclimated to the technology.