TRY FOR GOOD RESULTS
MINUTES TO REVISE A PARAGRAPH
SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINES TESTED
REUSABILITY
Ethically integrate ChatGPT into your writing workflow
We’re confident that you can integrate AI solutions like ChatGPT into your professional research work. Specifically, the workflow and results from these prompts do not plagiarize.
- These ChatGPT prompts build on your writing. ChatGPT isn’t making up ideas for you.
- These prompts give you revision options, so you’re still in the loop to decide what works best in your specific case.
- And if you acknowledge ChatGPT’s use (for instance, in an Acknowledgments section), it’s not deceptive to use ChatGPT's output directly in your research writing.
Our two recommended ethical principles for using this guide are:
1. Don’t hide your usage.
2. Don’t trust ChatGPT’s output.
As the Modern Language Association’s AI and Writing Task Force puts it, “Prejudice and backlash against authors who use these [AI] technologies is unacceptable.”
PhD-level writing requires multiple drafts.
Are you writing for a research project? That includes working on a dissertation, thesis, scientific research article, chapter, journal publication, conference submission, or proposal.
No matter the genre, scholarly writing is slow going. Postdocs and faculty struggle, and graduate students struggle too! It’s a lot of work to clearly write about complicated ideas, with a high level of formality, and including citations to existing scholarship. All with the high stakes of having your project reviewed—and maybe rejected—by other scholars.
Even drafting a paragraph beyond bullet points is exhausting, not to mention refining it further.
“Am I coming across clearly in this part?”
Plus, you might also be unsupported in your overall research writing work, without a good option for where to turn:
- Should you buy a book to learn scientific writing? That just adds more to your plate.
- Should you get a private writing coach? Great in theory, but it requires a lot of resources.
- (If you’re a student) Ideally your advisor would offer guidance, but they might be too distant / too busy / only interested in more experiments / not helpful / going to rewrite it anyway / only want to step in when you have a complete draft of a section.
You need something that can improve your paper today. If you have any text (especially if it's very rough), this guide can help!
Good revision options from ChatGPT means you’re in control.
Improving your first draft is all about trying again, in order to make it better. With this guide, you don't have to aimlessly tweak your paragraphs hoping they improve. Instead, improve your text easily and move on from where you’re stuck. Generate revisions, then either use them as-is, or select your favorite parts to make it an even better fit for your paper.
“With the prompts in this guide, ChatGPT takes some of the more informal pieces of my writing and makes it sound more scholastic. In my example, I would probably put my original paragraph and ChatGPT’s revision side-by-side and write a third version, drawing from both. Then I’m training myself.”
-Brian, Ph.D. in Robotics
OUR APPROACH
Integrate cutting-edge AI with domain expertise in writing
ChatGPT enters the conversation
Since it launched less than a year ago, ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. By combining massive datasets and enormous computing power, ChatGPT is able to produce human-like conversation, brainstorming, analysis, and more.
Free to use, the service has over 100 million users and a reputation for shockingly useful answers—but also occasional blunders.
Early research with professional consultants suggests that ChatGPT benefits both lower-performing and higher-performing people’s work.
A professional human touch
Will Penman is used to working closely with writers of all scholarly fields to achieve their goals. With a PhD in Rhetoric, 10+ years teaching scientific writing, and current work as a writing coach for STEM PhD students, Will knows how to break down complicated writing challenges into manageable steps—for humans and AI alike.
Will was a professor at Princeton University for four years, where he taught a writing course about AI, including large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. He gained hands-on research experience in LLMs’ benefits and subtle flaws.
“Your prompts are doing essentially, exactly what I would with a student. It would take at least half an hour of Writing Center, just to get these results with these two paragraphs.”
-Director, Engineering Composition Program
CHATGPT'S LIMITATIONS
Don’t waste time perfecting your instructions to ChatGPT.
Some PhD students spend hours tweaking what they ask ChatGPT to do with their writing.
“Help me make this clearer...”
“Please make this more formal...”
“I want to publish this paper, can you edit it for me?”
Even after putting in effort to carefully “engineer” your prompts, ChatGPT may still frustrate you.
Over-the-top word choice- Inconsistent outputs
- Sometimes worse results, especially regarding citations
Considering these style mismatches and errors, is ChatGPT more trouble than it’s worth for academic writers who are short on time?
With This Guide, You Can Get Good Results Today
Designed with scientific disciplines in mind.
When you buy “How To Prompt ChatGPT Like A Science Writing Pro,” your PDF guide includes:
- Complete multi-step prompt sequence for the Paragraph Improver
- Clear instructions
- A real sample of ChatGPT's responses
- Pointers so you can keep growing
- Sophisticated writing strategies behind the prompts
- How to identify high-quality output
- How to adapt the prompts to your own unique situation
- When/how to acknowledge ChatGPT’s involvement
- Plus, prompt sequences for two more research writing scenarios!
- Abstract Generator - bootstrap writing an extended Abstract (250 words) using your paper’s Introduction
- Emailing Your Professor - don’t agonize about what to say when turning in a new section, even if you’re finishing later than you hoped
Purchase and Delivery
One-time cost of $19.97 for unlimited personal use. PDF delivered as soon as you check out.
Go to chat.openai.com
Sign in with your account. Start a new conversation.
Copy and Paste into ChatGPT
You just fill out the parts that apply to your project.
Review the Results and Use
If the output is accurate and sophisticated, feel free to use it as-is.
DEMOS
How Well Can ChatGPT Do?
The prompts in this guide deliver reliable results for improving your paragraphs. Tested on scholarly fields in the sciences from Neuroscience to Bioengineering.
Spelling and grammar
Standardized by ChatGPT. Turn in a clean copy of your paper.
Sentence connections (thus, as far as, by, etc.)
ChatGPT's revisions mirror a scholarly structure of thought. Show readers the sophistication of your ideas.
Flow
Clearer with ChatGPT's advice, employing parallelism. Readers won't be bogged down.
Formality
Generally appropriate, with elevated but not exaggerated word choice. Sound like the scholar you're becoming.
Topic sentences
Often improved/developed. Readers will know up front what your paragraph's main claim is.
The following paragraph improvements were generated on the first try using the prompts in the guide.
Literature Review
A paragraph from the Literature Review dissertation chapter of a PhD student in Applied Linguistics. Notice that ChatGPT doesn’t have access to ongoing scholarship, so we ask it to revise paragraphs, not find citations.
Dissertation Proposal
From a “Risks and Contingencies” section of a Dissertation Proposal in Materials Science. We’ve tested the guide on 10 scientific disciplines and every section of a typical paper to make sure that your results are consistent and applicable. By revising one paragraph at a time, ChatGPT has the chance to do a deep dive.
TESTIMONIALS
See What Others Are Saying
Anonymous
Postdoc, Biomechanics
I like the structure of your guide. I like that you tell ChatGPT very detailed instructions. I feel more confident using this compared to just telling it “proofread this.”
Anonymous
Director, Engineering Composition Program
Oh my gosh, this paragraph is so much better! It’s focused and clear. If you can just put your paragraph through a machine like this and instantly have three different versions and then you can choose or even mix and match, it’s gonna be significantly faster than if students were sitting down with a tutor. My biggest fear about ChatGPT is that writers will simply put their work through and just not understand how it’s working, but using this multi-step process writers have the choice to retain their own agency and authority over their own writing.
Nour
Ph.D. Candidate
I love love love the idea
Anonymous
PhD student
I would 100% pay for your engineered prompts if they managed to overcome the challenges of it adding work, since ChatGPT's words on the page feel out-of-touch.
Joanna Bryson
Expert in AI ethics
ChatGPT didn’t say anything inaccurate with these prompts. It made the paragraph less dense. This is really interesting
Anonymous
Professor
Honestly, where it would help the most is non-native speakers.
Used this guide to revise your paragraphs? We'd love to see your before-and-after. Email Will or tag us in your social media posts.
Ethical principles
ChatGPT is a professional writing resource for scholars, similar to dictionaries, grammar editing software, and article search tools. When using ChatGPT, keep these two ethical principles in mind:
- Don’t hide your usage.
- The consensus among scholarly journals is that you should acknowledge using ChatGPT, but you should not list it as a coauthor.
- Be wary of using ChatGPT for school assignments. It may violate your course’s policies, and if so could be viewed as academic misconduct. More significantly, it may shortchange your own learning, and may just not produce very good ideas, since it wasn’t participating in the course and learning through those classroom interactions.
- Don’t trust its output.
- The consensus is that submitting a paper for publication means taking full responsibility for its contents! This is why you should only use ChatGPT’s output if you verify its content and logical structure, and why you shouldn’t use ChatGPT at all for things that it’s liable to hallucinate on, like identifying new scholarly references.
- Expect to follow up on your own. When using ChatGPT to brainstorm the significance of your research, use your domain knowledge to confirm that its output is realistic. When drafting, assess whether it got the right ideas, in the right sequence. When adapting text, confirm that the information needed for the new section was covered. When revising and condensing, make sure that the logical transitions, like “However” and “Furthermore,” accurately represent the flow of your thinking. Overall, treat ChatGPT’s output as a set of suggestions, which with your expert knowledge you can and should override as necessary.