Using ChatGPT as an Editor in Three Easy Steps

ChatGPT is great for all kinds of tasks, including editing and revising your writing.  It has endless patience and works on your schedule.  Want to write more like Justice Roberts or Justice Kagan?  It can help you do that.  Need help finding the right turn of phrase?  It can help you do that.  Need to change the tone of your prose to be more assertive?  It can do that, too.

And you don’t need a degree in computer science to do it.

In just three steps, you can turn ChatGPT into a fantastic editor.[i]  Those steps are (1) train it, (2) prompt it, (3) evaluate the output.

Step 1: Train the AI

Training ChatGPT sounds intimidating, especially for those of us who still struggle to order a pizza online, but it’s really just simplified teaching.  Imagine you want your writing to sound more like the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s work.  Before ChatGPT can help you, you have to teach ChatGPT what makes Justice Scalia’s writing unique.  To do that, you could describe his use of various rhetorical devices, wit, and tone. Or you could simply upload some of your favorite examples of his work to ChatGPT.[ii]

Step 2: Prompt the AI

Once you’ve given ChatGPT an idea of what you are looking for, you’ll need to tell it how you want it to assist you.  In your prompt, tell ChatGPT that you want your writing to sound more like the examples; then upload something of your own, ask it to compare your work with the examples, identify distinctions, and suggest changes.  You can ask for this output in whatever form suits you—a chart, a table, a list, etc.

Step 3: Evaluate the Output

In the final step, evaluate ChatGPT’s suggestions to see if they accomplish your stated goal.  If so, great!  If not, tweak your prompt to give ChatGPT more guidance or provide it additional examples to work from.  Using ChatGPT as an editing assistant is an iterative process; the more information you give it, the better output it creates, and the more useful it becomes.  And it will continue working as long as you want and making as many changes as you need, all without complaint.

It can also help by performing smaller tasks.  For example, I recently used ChatGPT to help my students identify passive voice in their own writing.  While their initial thought was to simply ask ChatGPT to analyze a passage and correct the passive voice, that approach does not yield great results. It frequently misidentifies other writing errors as passive voice and fails to identify actual instances of passive voice.  It is much more effective when you give it the same advice I give my students:  identify the verb and insert the phrase “by zombies” after it; if the sentence still makes sense, it’s probably passive voice. 

To try this yourself, first upload a passage of writing and tell ChatGPT to identify and italicize all verbs.  (When I first did this, I checked ChatGPT’s work to see if what it identified were, in fact, verbs.  It was correct about 99% of the time.)  Then, ask it to insert [by zombies] immediately after every verb.  It produces a product where you can easily read each sentence with the phrase “by zombies” after the verbs and more readily identify where passive voice is present.

The ways in which ChatGPT can be used as an editor are limited by only your own imagination.  And though you may have to teach it how you want something done, once you do, it becomes an invaluable and indefatigable assistant.

 

[i] Though I refer to ChatGPT here, this process is equally applicable to other generative AI platforms.

[ii] If you are not sure what makes Justice Scalia’s writing unique, you could also ask ChatGPT what the various examples have in common.  You could then use its answer in conjunction with the examples to help ChatGPT understand what you are looking for.