Hey Warrior,

When you ask ChatGPT to write something, it often sounds very robotic.

It can be difficult to guide it in the right direction to help you to write text in the style you want and expect.

But I’ve found that with the following three adjustments, you can fine-tune your writing with ChatGPT extremely well. These are:

• The level of formality

• The sentence structure

• The word choice

Let’s dive into each of them and see how you can adjust these to improve your writing with ChatGPT.

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🤖 The level of formality

Formality refers to the level of seriousness and professionalism in the writing.

More formal writing tends to use sophisticated vocabulary, full sentences, and a serious tone.

Less formal writing is more casual and conversational.

Without specifying formality, ChatGPT tends to default to a moderately formal tone.

For example, here's a basic prompt without specifying formality:

"Write a short email to a CEO asking if I can get on a call with him for 30min to pick his brain."

As expected, ChatGPT gives me a pretty formal email that just doesn’t sound very appealing…

Now let's specify a more casual tone by using the following addition to this prompt:

Write a short email to a CEO asking if I can get on a call with him for 30min to pick his brain.

Use this guideline for your writing style:
Formality: 3/10 (1 = casual, colloquial language; 10 = highly formal, structured language)

(The great thing about this prompt format, is that you can adjust the level of formality by adjusting the value. Also see my recent post about the LEVER prompt here.)

The resulting output is a lot better…

Adjusting the formality is especially useful in texts where you’re doing direct communication, such as an email or a text message.

🧠 The sentence structure

Sentence structure refers to the way in which words and phrases are arranged to create sentences.

More complex sentences are usually harder to follow. They’re great for pieces of writing where you need to convey more complex topics (for example in novels or academic writing), but for online writing they’re usually not very suited.

Simpler, shorter sentences on the other hand improve readability and are much easier to digest.

By default, ChatGPT tends to write sentences that are not simple enough (for my taste). So I tend to adjust this value downwards.

Here’s a basic prompt without a sentence structure specification:

“Write a short blog post about artificial intelligence.”

As you can see, the output has elaborate phrases and sounds almost like something you would read in a novel:

Now let’s adjust this prompt by including a sentence structure specification.

Write a short blog post about artificial intelligence.

Use this guideline for your writing style:
Sentence Structure: 3/10 (1 = simple, short sentences, easy to follow; 10 = extensive use of complex, compound sentences)

And here’s the resulting output:

I like this adjusted version a lot better.

The sentences are much shorter and the text sounds more punchy. This style feels a lot more light-weight and enjoyable to read, particularly for online texts.

💡 The word choice

Word choice is basically how simple or sophisticated the words are.

As with the other two values, you want to aim for simple words to appeal to a larger audience.

Let’s test it out. Here's our starting prompt:

"Write the copy of a landing page for my new course about prompt engineering"

The output is probably the most ChatGPT thing ever. You can tell it’s ChatGPT from miles away…

When it uses the words:

• Unlock

• Unleash

• Harness

… you almost always know that it was ChatGPT. It does that especially often when doing copywriting, i.e. promoting something.

Now let’s change that with the following prompt:

Write the copy of a landing page for my new course about prompt engineering.

Use this guideline for your writing style:
Word Choice: 2/10 (1 = simple, straightforward words; 10 = specialized, sophisticated words)

The following output is better in my opinion, simply because the words are simpler:

You’ll notice that it does still sound a bit too promotional. This is because our prompt is asking it to write “copy”, so it will default into a very promotional writing style. So the simpler word choice won’t necessarily have an effect on that.

In this case, you could adjust that by telling it to write less promotional and more fact-based and telling it to exclude words like “unlock” and “mastery”.

Let’s modify the prompt a bit further:

Write the copy of a landing page for my new course about prompt engineering.

Use this guideline for your writing style:
- Word Choice: 2/10 (1 = simple, straightforward words; 10 = specialized, sophisticated words)
- Promotional: 2/10 (1 = fact-based, bland; 10 = excessively promotional)
- Do not use words like "Unlock, Mastery, Unleash, Harness" 

While the previous version sounded like a marketer is trying to sell you something, this version sounds a lot less promotional…

Thanks for reading!

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See you in the next one!

Moritz

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