Thread by @thatroblennon

ChatGPT’s writing style is terrible. It’s wordy, verbose, and repetitive.

The content can be excellent...But the delivery? Not so much.

Let's change that. 👇

🔹 Each snippet below, gives you a way to tweak ChatGPT's voice, tone, and writing style.

I’ve combined each one with the same simple instruction:

"How can I get ahead in my career?"

This way it's easy to compare the results.

10 ChatGPT writing style prompt snippets:

🔸 Dump the Pre- and Post-Text

First, a bit of magic for you.

Paste this in before any ChatGPT query.

[Return only the main response. Remove pre-text and post-text.]

Unnecessary intro and conclusion, be gone!

Ahh, so much better.

🔸 Clear. Concise. No Jargon.

An easy hack is to ask it to write at a 5th grade level.

But that’s also an ambiguous idea for a language model.

Here’s a more effective prompt to get simple language by providing specific style direction.

🔸 Conversational + Relatable

AI writing can be dry and stuffy.

But it doesn’t have to be.

It knows perfectly well how to talk normally, that’s just not the default.

Here’s a voice/tone/style guide I love.

🔸 Format Using Markdown

Asking for extra formatting is a sweetener that I use regularly in my prompts.

I find it much easier to work with the output versus longer paragraphs stacked together.

Keep this one close.

🔸 Punchy Writing that Pops

Tbh, by itself, this preset is overkill.

(Especially if you leave my instruction to use sentence fragments.)

It writes like an Apple ad.

And that’s what I love about it.

(Use for inspiration or blend with other styles.)

🔸 Persuasive Storyteller

If you ask ChatGPT to write like a copywriter, it will try to sell you stuff.

I guess I don’t blame it for having that impression of us.

But if you want well-written copy without the salesy vibe, use this.

🔸 Clarity Snippet

A style guide focused on coherence and clarity.

This is better than writing at a 5th grade level in many business situations.

It results in clear and easy prose that still has an element of sophistication.

🔸 Clear + Thorough

Maybe you want to turn the sophistication level up to 11?

This’ll do it.

Here, the writing becomes formal, complex, and potentially backed by science.

It will even critique counter-arguments for you.

🔸 Conversational English

I discovered this while trying to get the AI to consistently speak in broken English.

The result, is, perhaps ironically, very clear and easy to read.

Another good alternative to "write like a 5th grader" that's more specific.

🔸 Emulate a Writer

For writers who have large bodies of work, language models can emulate their style.

Instead of describing the voice and tone you want, try asking it to write as someone.

Here are some names to try emulating:

Malcolm Gladwell
Chip Heath
Dan Ariely
Robert Cialdini
Seth Godin
Simon Sinek
Gary Vaynerchuk
Brené Brown
Mark Twain
Jane Austen
Ernest Hemingway
Maya Angelou
George Orwell
William Shakespeare
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

🔹 Warning:
↳ 🔹Too much style doesn’t work very well

I tested combing different styles.

This a common technique with AI art models to improve the results.

But with text, too many instructions resulted in average content.

(You can still add formatting instructions.)

🔹 Warning:
↳ 🔹Style tends to drift back to standard

Even within a single passage, I found that it would start off with my style directions, but gradually revert to the more standard ChatGPT way of writing.

More experimentation is needed here.

🔹 Formatting[ ]

You’ll notice in my prompts that I bundle the style guide inside brackets.

[Like this.]

Still experimenting, but brackets seem to prevent the style from bleeding into the content itself.

Otherwise, you may find your style words coming up in expected ways.

💠 Wrap Up

The default ChatGPT output is wordy, so try different style prompts to get closer to your final goal.

Even with a style guide, though, I still suggest you edit anything an AI gives you before publishing it.

Don’t lose the habit of taking ownership over your words.

🔹 Want these?:

I'm adding these prompts to my AI writing course. But today, I’m giving them to you, free.

All these prompts are in a doc for easy cut-and-pasting.

Like and RT the FIRST tweet in this thread and I’ll auto-DM you the link.

Must be following to get the DM.

💠 And if you're looking to jump ahead on ChatGPT:

Join 700 of us in my course and AI writing system.

Purchasing power parity is available for many countries.

Comes with a ton of example prompts even better than the ones in this thread:
aicontentreactor.com

That’s all for now.

Don’t forget to Like+RT the FIRST tweet if you want me to DM you the link to these prompts for easy copy/paste.

Would love to hear your comments as well. :)

Follow @thatroblennon for more on systems to improve your writing.

https://twitter.com/thatroblennon/status/1613969923285344256

Btw, 4,396+ subscribers get AI writing, business, and audience-building help every week:

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Looks like my auto-DM is maxing out, so…

Here’s the link to the copy/paste doc for anyone who needs it.

Thanks for all the help with likes/comments/RTs 🙌

doc.clickup.com/42042215/d/h/1…