How to speed up your writing by prompting AI with your rough draft bullet points
I've been using an AI chatbot called Pi to help me with writing.
When I have an idea, I write it down in bullet points first.
I kind of just vomit the main points that I'm trying to get across and I don't worry at all about the grammar or the spelling or how it sounds.
This allows me to quickly get my initial thoughts down without obsessing over the details.
Then I write a prompt for Pi.
And Pi takes care of writing it eloquently with correct spelling and grammar.
I usually have to make small tweaks to the output based on how well Pi understands me, but it is still 2-3x faster than if I tried to write it on my own.
Two-step process
Here’s a strategy I’ve been using to speed up my writing with the help of an AI chatbot:
Type main ideas manually, stream of consciousness, bullet-point format
Prompt AI: “Can you write a paragraph that includes these ideas? [insert bullet points]”
Getting past the initial resistance
I’ve realized it’s an emotional, energetic push to get past the initial resistance to write something down.
Where does the resistance come from?
Worrying that your writing won’t be good enough
Expecting your rough draft to be perfect
Worrying about what people will think
Fear of saying something you shouldn’t
Fatigue, lack of focus, lack of creativity
Writer’s block
You can get past most of those points of resistance by allowing your raw stream of consciousness to flow from your mind to your fingers typing on the keyboard.
If it feels like too much work to type, speak the words in your mind aloud and let a transcription software like Otter do the writing for you.
Don’t worry about whether it will be good enough.
It doesn’t need to be perfect.
You can review it before it’s published.
Now is not the editing phase. Now is the raw creation phase. And the only way to mess it up is by allowing your premature editing instinct to disrupt the flow from your consciousness to words.
Use bullet points
If you’re typing, use a bullet-point format. It helps to have the white space between words and the structure of the bullets. Makes it easier to digest and understand, compared to a block of text.
If you’re using speech-to-text transcription, you’ll need to break the transcript into bullet points after you’ve finished recording your audio.
Once you have a list of rough draft bullet points, let AI transform these into “good writing.”
Use AI
This is the prompt I use:
“Can you write a paragraph that includes these ideas? [insert bullet points]”
The AI chatbot will return a paragraph that incorporates the main ideas of your bullet points into a paragraph with logical flow, intelligent word choice, and correct grammar and spelling.
It’s similar to having an assistant.
You walk into the office. You’re in between meetings. But you have ideas in your head. So you say them out loud and ask your assistant to write them down.
One of the ideas is an email you need to send to a client.
You speak aloud the main gist of the email and then ask your assistant to make it well-written before they send the email.
The “well-written” part is actually a lot of work
This is why writing is a skill.
There are mechanical elements of writing, based on objective and learnable rules: sentence structure, word choice, grammar, spelling, tone, clarity, overall cohesion and flow.
It takes a non-trivial amount of time and effort to apply these elements to a rough draft in order to progress the writing forward to the final draft.
This is the part of the process where a lot of writers burn out and their great ideas end up in the graveyard of unfinished drafts.
This is also the part of the writing process that AI can take off your plate.
Because most of these elements are based on rules.
AI is good at learning rules and applying them.
The part of writing that AI can’t do
The more time you spend doing the “well-written” part of the writing process, the less time you spend doing the work of coming up with more ideas.
And there’s even a layer of work before coming up with ideas, which is deciding where you want to focus your attention.
Three levels of work for a writer:
Spiritual: where do you energetically want to focus your attention?
Mental: how does that manifest into ideas?
Physical: how does that manifest into written words?
AI can do the physical and maybe half of the mental, but it can’t do the other half of the mental and the spiritual.
What I’ve learned so far about using AI to write
When I learned about ChatGPT in November 2022, I think I slightly overestimated its abilities.
I thought 90% of writing would be AI-generated overnight.
Here’s what I’ve realized after using various AI writing tools over the past year:
It is, in fact, mind-blowingly easy to generate thousands of words of decent writing with AI.
However, the quality of AI-generated writing is capped at “decent” without applying certain skills that are, at this point, still uniquely human.
Also, the purpose of writing in the first place is called into question. Is our goal just to produce as much writing as possible? Why? For profit? Or is there a uniquely human goal for at least some forms of writing?
Uniquely human skills required to make AI writing more than decent
When using AI for writing, there’s a balance between the amount of work the human needs to do and the work that the AI can be expected to do well.
If you just give AI a prompt that's not very detailed, it often fails to write exactly what you mean. Without enough context and direction, the AI ends up going off in the wrong direction.
Which is why I think this bullet-point strategy works.
It requires some writing from you on the front end.
You have to write the bullet points with your main ideas and then you have to write the prompt.
Basically, you need to write the rough draft version of what you have in mind.
This will significantly improve the AI’s output, in terms of how well the output aligns with your vision, compared to giving the AI a broad or vague prompt.
If you want to learn more about using AI for writing, check out my project, AI Writers Academy.