How to Write an Essay WITHOUT using ChatGPT | When using AI to write essays goes wrong!

 
 

Teachers know you’re using ChatGPT!

I’m writing about this partially as a public service announcement. People know when you’re using ChatGPT. I know a lot of high school students think, “oh, I’m not gonna do my homework — I’m gonna have ChatGPT do it for me.” Well, guess what? You will eventually come up against somebody, whether it’s a professor or a high school teacher, who says, “this writing makes no sense,” — so you’re going to have to know how to write an essay.

Also, if you’re thinking about your essay for college, you’re going to have to write that too, right? ChatGPT can’t talk about your personal experiences. So, today, we’re going to talk about how to write an essay if you don’t want to use ChatGPT.

A little story about ChatGPT…

Let me tell you a little story about ChatGPT. We’ve all been reading articles about it and how “good” it is. So, we had a candidate applying for a job who sent us these really long emails that meandered around. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience of reading something and feeling confused about what someone is trying to say, but I found myself wondering “I don’t know why this person wrote this email — I don’t know what I’m supposed to do as a result of having read this!”

So, we wrote back to this candidate asking for more specificity, but they kept sending this same kind of meandering email that didn’t really answer our questions. One of my staff members said to me, “Hey, Alyssa, I think it’s possible that this candidate is having ChatGPT write their emails!” So I looked back and thought, you know, some of these sentences don’t really make sense and they’re not truly communicating information. So, I think this candidate might have been ChatGPT-ing us. Needless to say, we are not hiring that candidate, and so I’m making this video partially as a public service announcement. People know when you’re using ChatGPT!

Hallmarks of a Great Essay

Generating the Outline & Your Ideas

Start with Examples

Today we’re going to talk about what the hallmarks of a great essay are. For me, the hardest part of writing an essay is always coming up with the introduction and conclusion. You might think of this as the thesis statement.

The easiest thing for me is always to make a list of the things I want to talk about, write them down, and figure out what the connective tissue is between them. Sometimes you don’t know what you want to say. You know the examples you feel comfortable talking about, so I’ve always found it’s easier to start from the examples and then say, OK, what point does all of this coalesce into? What single thing do all of these things tell me? Since I’m always talking about the SAT and why it matters, I’ll use that as an example. Here is the specific example I’d use:

SAT Example

You have 2.3x the chance of getting in with an SAT score. You self-select into a smaller pool by sending SAT scores and, if you multiply both stats, you can increase your chance of getting in by up to seven times! HBCU’s don’t give scholarships and merit aid without SATs. Moving your SAT score up with a high GPA can move your salary from $52,000 to $128,000 — 2.5 times more. That’s crazy!

Connective Tissue & Framing it Together

Let’s look at the above examples and ask: what is the connective tissue between these? The SAT matters. People are saying we’re test optional but actually the SAT totally matters and here’s why.

What I just did was starting with my examples. I started with the things I wanted to say, and then I said, what point are all of these things making? The next part is thinking about actually constructing it. When you are writing a paragraph, remember:

    • Tell them what you’re going to tell them 

    • Then tell them what you’ve told them

When you talk to people who were educated in other countries, their method of convincing people is not as repetitive. A lot of American writing is about persuasion — we like to ‘hit home’ —and, if you think about an essay, it’s a lot about persuasion. You’re saying “I believe this thing because of all of these examples.” If you’re getting to the point where you wrote your body paragraphs and are now trying to figure out your introduction and conclusion, focus on one thing for the thesis statement. In this example, it might be “Why is the SAT such a big lever?” That’s my statement. The SAT is a huge lever. Thesis statement. Then, you can expand that into your introduction and conclusion paragraphs.

Cheap Tricks for Expanding your Essay

Here are a couple of cheap tricks for expanding your essay. You can talk about where we are and why this is relevant or interesting.

So, let’s take the SAT example. Where are we? More kids now are saying “college is not for me” than ever before. But, let me quote some statistics to you. Going to college increases your lifespan by seven years and increases your earnings by 1 million dollars over the course of your life. So now I’ve given you context, right? I’ve talked about why college is important and for a lot of colleges, you have to take the SAT and, even if you don’t have to take it, it’s going to help you get in. So I am giving you all of that context.

Generating Conclusion Text

Once you’ve written your body paragraphs, you have to write your conclusion. I have always found that the conclusion is the hardest because it’s a restatement of the theme. I basically say the thesis that I’ve already said, just in different words. I paraphrase it.

The conclusion is also a great place for hypotheticals. How does it influence other things? What could it suggest that a person should do? Hypotheticals are coulds, shoulds, and woulds. As you’re thinking about writing your conclusion, you can also talk about why it’s significant. What would this pertain to and what would this impel me to do potentially in the future? Or what could this instruct someone to do? Then, you want to include why all of that is relevant. How does this now bear further investigation or what now bears further investigation now that you have this information?

Generating Body Text and Overall Structure

Sandwiches

If you’re thinking about your essay as a whole, you’re thinking of it kind of as a sandwich or sandwiches. If you’re thinking about it from a macro perspective, I want the whole essay to be a sandwich:

  1. Intro (top bread)

  2. The three paragraphs (middle of the sandwich: my meats)

    • I also want each paragraph to be its own little sandwich where the first sentence is an introduction, the last sentence is a conclusion, and then the insides are the things that bear it out.

    • So, for instance, if you’re giving an example, you want to think of three things to say to enrich that example, to tie it back to your original thesis.

  3. Conclusion (bottom bread)

    • It's okay to keep your conclusions brief. Sometimes you don’t have that much to say and you’ve just written an entire paper. You can restate your thesis, including why it’s important, why it’s relevant, what it might be able to affect, and one or two ways that we could use it in the future. At the end, ask yourself “Do I have anything else to say?” If not, then great, you’re done! ChatGPT is, I think, particularly offensive because it does seem to have so much to say.

Editing

This brings me to the final part of the essay-writing process: editing. This is a thing that students have a lot of trouble with because revision often feels like “I don’t know how many times I have to revise this to get it perfect because I don’t know what perfect is!” What are all the things that have to be checked off for me to say, OK, I’m done with this project? Here’s a quick checklist you can work from:

Sounds Nice, Says Nothing

Here’s the first thing to proofread for: sounds nice, says nothing.

There is a teacher at Park East High School, Ms. Worthington, who uses this phrase when she’s grading students' papers. I think it's hilarious. If you’ve ever met a person who uses a lot of filler words or takes a really long time to say something that could be said in a shorter period of time, that’s what I mean by ‘Sounds nice, says nothing’.

When editing, read your paper and, instead of trying to sound smart, try to be clear. I think a lot of people think that when they use big words, it makes them sound smart. It often doesn’t. Often they are using big words incorrectly. That’s called a malapropism. For example, using the word “exasperate” instead of “exaggerate”. When we are using words that we can’t completely control, we are often doing malapropisms and the people around us know that they’re happening and they actually make the person who’s using those words look less smart rather than more smart.

Be Clean, Clear, Insightful, and Specific

I would say your best bet is to be as clean, clear, insightful, and specific as possible. If there’s an easier way to say it, say it that way. Only use a big word if that’s the ONLY word that will quantify the thing that’s going on. Very interesting, right?  

Use Word Count to Your Advantage

So you’ve skimmed for “sounds nice, say nothing” and have removed any long, awkward, drawn-out phrases. Similarly, challenge yourself to say more stuff within a word count (instead of creating additional phrases just to fill space). Include four examples instead of three — mind blowing, right?

Spelling, Grammar, and Punctuation

Spelling should be taken care of by your word processor. Don’t assume that just because Google Docs thinks you’ve made a grammar error that you necessarily have — sometimes Google Docs is wrong. Don’t assume that just because it’s underlined in blue, it’s wrong. But it can be helpful as a guide.

The Sentence Test

The best test that I would use is the “Is this a sentence?” test. Remember that a sentence has to have a subject and a verb. Example: He ran. Dad helped. I ate. All full sentences. So it has to have a subject and a verb.

It should not have a dependent clause marker word without an independent clause. A dependent clause marker word might be “instead of eating in the corner.” Instead of eating in the corner…what? You need more information, right? You need an independent clause. “He ate in the corner.” I don’t need an independent clause. I have an independent clause. It’s already there. So I would do the sentence test, make sure each one of your sentences can stand on its own and that there’s a subject and a verb that are active and there’s no extra dependent clause marker word.

What Do You Want The Person Reading This To Think?

After all of this, there is one more thing you should do. Ask yourself: what do I want the person reading this to think? Especially if you’re writing a personal essay, what do you want the person who’s reading this to think of you after you’re done? Do you want them to think you’re smart, funny, warm, charming, kind, wise?

There are lots of things that someone can think after reading an essay and many of them are good. You don’t have to get people to think all of the good things — you have to pick some, right? So if you’re talking about a coming of age story, maybe you want them to understand that you’re smarter now than you used to be. If you’re talking about something bad that happened to you and you made lemonade out of lemons, you want people to understand that you’re flexible and resilient. What are the things that you want people to understand and how are you sending that message?

Proofread!!!

Proofread and make sure someone else reads it. Obviously if it’s an essay that you’re turning in to a professor for a grade, the professor isn’t going to read it beforehand, although they might if you go to their office hours and ask them to. But in those cases, you can take it to a writing lab.

If you’re living at home, have your mom or dad read it or have somebody that lives with you or somebody that cares about you read it. If it’s an essay and it really matters for your English class, and your social studies teacher is willing to read it for you, do that! Take them up on it.

Anybody else's eyes will give you a better opportunity to look at your essay fresh. Have your computer read it to you. That’s a great way to look at it from a different perspective. When we are involved in our own writing, we are super into it and we understand the thing that we’re trying to say. So sometimes, you’ll leave out a couple of words but your mind fills them in because your mind knows that thing you’re trying to say. But if you listen to it, you’re listening to it with a different perspective rather than reading it, and so then you’ll hear missing words. Basically the idea of having something or someone read it to you is getting a fresh perspective on what you’ve written.

That’s pretty much it! If you are doing those things, your essay is going to be significantly better than it was when you started, and very likely to be extremely successful. 

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