Using AI to help you outline your content

(keyboard tapping) - As somebody's written a number of these things, I've got some advice for your writing and that is, make sure you've got everything ready before you hit the keyboard. It's a bit like cooking. You should have all your ingredients ready and prepped before you really get into it in earnest. You know when you're writing you don't want anything to be stopping your flow while you need to go to a cupboard to pick up a spice mix that this analogy isn't working. What you want is to have stats, quotes, stories, facts, all sorts of stuff that are your ingredients to go into your writing so that you can keep the flow going. If you're stopping and starting, it's a really painful process. So let's look at how Chat GPT can help us get everything in place before we begin. I've got a prompt that I shall paste down here, you are an expert copywriter known for your ability to write persuasive and easy-to-read text. Please list the most important points to me when writing an article about and then we put our subject down here and then we put in more information. And this is really important because the more information we give it the more precise the response can be. Please start by asking questions to gather the information you need. So Chat GPT is going to interview me to make sure it has all the right information before it begins. Do not offer a response until you have the answers. Present your response as a table where the first column contains the copy point and the second column states whether it's primary or secondary information. So let's put some information in here right now. What we're going to do is we're going to choose our subject as compassion in the workplace. And for more information, I've got a chunk of information I've pre-written here. I've got pre-prepared which is just saying workplaces don't tend to be very compassionate places, and the article should talk about the power of caring from a business point of view. Then at that point is going to interview me. So here we go. Let's put this in and see how this interview goes. Right, now it's written me some really great questions. I'm not going to type them in in real time. You are going to fast forward through all this so you don't have to worry about it. Here we go. (upbeat music) So as you can see, I actually put in quite a lot of text there. It's working with a lot of information. So that means that it can be far more specific in what it's going to offer me. So let's see what its response is. Okay. Now it's given me six points here. The six points are good. However, I want more points than that. So I'm going to ask it. Please, can you write me another six points to add to this list? Let's see how we get on here. Great. So we've now got 12 points to work with. That means that we can probably move on to our next step. Our next step is taking this information and asking chat GPT to use it to write the flow of an article. It's not going to write the article at this stage. It's going to write the flow for the article so that we can check that we are happy with the direction it's going in. So I've got a prompt for you here. You are an expert copywriter known for your ability to write persuasive and easy to read text, just like before, please use the information above to write a suggested flow for the article. Write your copy flow as bullet points. I want to see what it comes up with. As somebody who's written plenty of articles, this is not bad at all. So what we can do is if we want a little bit more information here is we can just keep digging deeper. That's what we're doing. We're just saying outline this, and then we can take a chunk of it and say, give me more information on that and then we can dive into that and ask for it to expand. So let's look at here the, let's look at this one here, challenges and we'll ask it. Can you please expand on challenges of creating a compassionate workplace? Write me 250 words of copy and give me the bullet points of the most important elements. Okay. It's given me lots of stuff to work with there. I feel far more equipped to write this piece. However, what we've got to understand that a lot of this has actually come from the information that I gave the computer in the first place. It's now just formatting it in a far more digestible way that will make it easier for me to start writing. So what we can do, if you want, is you could go ahead and say to Chat GPT, write, based on this, please write me an article. But I would recommend that you don't. I think there's still more thought that needs to go in this before you get something that's truly going to be of value. Don't skimp on the fact that you need to be adding into this process as well. Don't expect this all to be fully formed on absolutely brilliant. It won't be, you need to add yourself in there and to make sure that what you are writing is something that communicates something that is original and is of value to your audience. I know I'm repeating myself but it's something that's worth repeating. (keyboard tapping)