You can belong to those elite few who enjoy writing essays. And you can be one of a larger community of students who find writing assignments tedious. If you belong to the latter group, you probably hate the concept of the assignment and the process of performing it. And there are a few things that you may dislike about essay writing.
But regardless of the group you belong to, you certainly hate it when your writing assignment has a confusing topic. You know, like, “Do you think overpopulation will have a negative or positive effect in the long run?”. What are you going to write about? List the possible negative and negative effects or choose between them and try to defend your choice.
To be fair, it’s not that difficult, but topics like that are one of the reasons why students would turn to essay writing services rather than doing the task on their own. A professional writer knows what to do with a topic like that. But hey, we can use an AI essay writer now: they must be good with confusing topics, right? Well, not exactly.
Why Prompts Are Important When Dealing With AI
There are AI tools that can help you write an essay, and there are AI tools that can write an essay for you. But there’s a reason why papers produced by AI are strongly recommended to be used as drafts, especially in the latter case. You can wrap your mind around a confusing topic. Professional essay writers can do it as well. AI can’t do it on its own. But even with simple topics, AI requires additional information:
- The type of your essay;
- The main focus of your essay;
- What points should be disclosed;
- Sources to use;
- The length of your essay.
As you can see, you cannot just feed your essay topic to an AI tool and expect it to produce a paper based solely on it. Well, you can, but the result will force you into rewriting the whole thing, regretting that you didn’t order it from a custom writing service or write it yourself. But things are salvageable, so don’t ditch the idea of using an AI tool for your paper yet.
You need to provide the tool with a proper prompt so it understands the purpose of your essay. Thus, it’s not exactly letting the AI do everything for you, but you don’t have to write the entire essay yourself. Moreover, if you didn’t like the first draft, you can ask to do the second one. And you don’t have to worry that its feelings are hurt or that it will charge you extra for a second draft.
So, let’s check three variants of prompts that will allow an AI to generate a worthy essay. Mind that the prompts here are designed for AI tools like ChatGPT, as that’s going to be your most likely choice. Also, the prompts here are good for argumentative or persuasive essays. Narrative essays frequently require writing on personal topics at which you’re better than any essay writer, human or artificial.
Prompt #1: A Persuasive Essay on Bullying
Let’s imagine that you have to write a persuasive essay on the topic of whether public schools do enough to handle bullying. Your point is that they don’t. You may want to add a particular twist to your essay. Let’s say not only do public schools not do enough to handle bullying, but they even ban books that deal with bullying from their libraries. So, your prompt should look something like that:
“Write a 5-page high school essay on whether public schools do enough to handle bullying. The main focus of the essay is that public schools don’t put enough effort into preventing bullying. Define what bullying is in the introduction* and explain why it’s an important issue. In the main body, provide statistical data that proves my point**. Mention that works of fiction and non-fiction that deal with bullying are banned from school libraries. Provide the list of said books**.”
* If there are particular literary sources that you’d like to mention in your essay, don’t forget to notify the AI tool about that.
** If you want to mention particular works of fiction and non-fiction that are currently or were banned during some period, also mention them to the AI.
Prompt #2: Analytical Essay on Gun Control
Gun control and gun violence are unlikely to stop being a hot topic in the US any time soon. But let’s imagine you don’t want to simply state that guns are bad. You want to delve into the subject. Find the reasons why the Second Amendment was implemented and why so many citizens hold on to it. Maybe people don’t feel safe without guns. But what to do with gun violence?
“Write a 2500-word college analytical essay on gun control. The main focus of the essay is finding the reasons why so many Americans find the right to bear arms crucial. List the main reasons for the implementation of the Second Amendment. Provide the contrary opinions of proponents and opponents of its abolishment.”
This is a topic that may require serious rewrites from you. If you’re passionate about it, consider writing it on your own. Alternatively, you can browse through the best research paper writing services and entrust professionals to write a draft for you.
Prompt #3: Argumentative Essay on Media Propaganda
You want your AI to craft an argumentative essay on how to deal with media propaganda in other countries, as it poses a threat to the Western World. And you want to draw the parallels between the Nazi propaganda during WWII and the present-day media of countries with anti-Western attitudes.
“Write a 2500-word college argumentative essay on the media propaganda and the dangers it poses for the US, the EU, and the Commonwealth. The main objective is that citizens of the Western world should be aware of the existence of said media to understand the dangers. Make parallels between the propaganda in Nazi Germany and the propaganda of the present day in Russia, China, North Korea, etc.”
Here you can rely on the AI, but you can make your own suggestions. For example, the Palestinian children’s TV show – or should we say TV show for brainwashing children – “The Pioneers of Tomorrow” had strong antisemitic and anti-Western messages.
Final Thoughts
You can use AI for writing essays, but you need to give it proper prompts for that. Hopefully, the examples provided here will give you ideas on how to help AI tools generate better papers. Basically, the more details you provide it with, the better it works.