Teachers: Here's How You Can Train ChatGPT to Write Like You

Everyone writes differently, and you want ChatGPT to write like you. You don’t want it to “glimpse into” something every time you ask for details. Before ChatGPT launched the “Customize ChatGPT” feature, you might have written something like this:

“Rewrite the following paragraph in an authentic and direct voice, with a friendly and encouraging tone, and a concise structure.”

But even that doesn’t fully describe your unique style since there are thousands, if not millions of people whose style can be described with words like ‘authentic’, ‘direct’, ‘friendly’, and ‘encouraging’. Plus describing the style every time you write a prompt is a hassle.

The “Customize ChatGPT” settings help solve this problem. But getting those settings just right can be tricky and takes some experimentation.

This article shows how you can train ChatGPT to consistently write the way you want.

At a high level, you’ll first have to find and define your style, feed it into ChatGPT using the settings, and ask it to follow it while prompting. Let’s “delve into” the steps.

5 key elements that make up your writing style

Your unique writing style and how you communicate are shaped by five key elements:

1. Voice is your distinct personality or unique expression. It’s how your individuality shines through in your writing. For example, Mark Twain’s voice is often humorous and conversational, like in “The secret of getting ahead is getting started” while J.K. Rowling’s is imaginative—“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”

2. Tone is your attitude towards the subject or your audience. It sets the mood of your writing—serious, playful, sarcastic, or enthusiastic.

3. Diction refers to your choice of words and vocabulary. Your diction can be formal, informal, technical, or colloquial, and it greatly affects the readability and feel of your text. For example:

   • Formal diction: “The results of the experiment were inconclusive, necessitating further investigation.”
   • Informal diction: “We didn’t get clear results, so we need to look into it more.”

4. Style is the overall way you use language to express your thoughts. It includes your voice, tone, diction, and syntax. The combination of these elements makes your writing unique.

5. Structure is the organization and framework of your writing—the arrangement of your sentences, paragraphs, and the overall flow. A well-structured piece helps convey your message clearly and logically.

How to find your writing style using ChatGPT

You’ll be training ChatGPT on your style, but first, you need to define it in a way that can be fed into ChatGPT. Follow these steps to find your writing style:

• Gather your content: Identify four to six pieces of written content that truly reflect your style or the style you want ChatGPT to emulate. Digital copies are ideal because you’ll copy-paste them in the next step.
• Analyze with ChatGPT: Feed one of your pieces to ChatGPT and ask it to analyze your writing style. Note that with a free account, you can only paste about 3,000 words at a time. Here’s a prompt you can use:

Analyze the writing voice, tone, diction, style and structure of the following write-up delimited by triple backticks. Use concise bullet points for each criteria.
"""insert your write-up"""

• Use URLs if You Have ChatGPT Plus: If your content is online and you have access to ChatGPT Plus, paste the URL to your articles and use this prompt:

Analyze the writing voice, tone, diction, style and structure of each write-up linked bellow. Use concise bullet points for each criteria.
"""insert links to your write-ups"""

• Repeat the Process: If ChatGPT is analyzing one piece of content at a time, repeat the steps for every write-up you’ve gathered.
• Review and Note Patterns: After ChatGPT has analyzed all your write-ups, review the results and look for recurring patterns. Note the descriptors and bullet points that come up in different write-ups and resonate with you, and disregard those that don’t.

How to “Customize ChatGPT” according to your style

Now that you’ve identified and defined your writing style, add them to ChatGPT’s system.

1. Go to the Customize ChatGPT settings in your account.

2. In the section under What would you like ChatGPT to know about you to provide better responses?, enter some context about your background, personality, occupation, the type of write-ups you frequently create, etc. Provide as much context as you’re comfortable with.

3. In the section under How would you like ChatGPT to respond? enter the characteristics of your writing style that you just defined earlier. Here’s a template you can use to input your instructions:

Use this voice: \[enter your bullet points and optionally some descriptions]
Use this tone: \[enter your bullet points and optionally some descriptions]
Use this diction: \[enter your bullet points and optionally some descriptions]
Use this style: \[enter your bullet points and optionally some descriptions]
Use this structure: \[enter your bullet points and optionally some descriptions]

Feel free to add more instructions like how long or short your response should generally be, how you want to be addressed, whether or not ChatGPT should have opinion or remain neutral, any topic you’d like it to avoid, etc.

4. Click the toggle next to Enable for new chats and click Save.

Utilize, Test, and Tweak as You Go

Once you’ve nailed down your writing style and set up custom instructions in ChatGPT, it’s time to experiment. Have ChatGPT draft your next lesson plan or add some engaging questions to your classroom discussion prompts. When writing prompts, remind ChatGPT to follow the customized settings.

For instance, “Use my customized writing style to rewrite this paragraph.”

Over time you can simplify it to “rewrite this in my style” or “create that in my style.”

See how well ChatGPT captures your style, then compare the generated content with your original writing to spot any discrepancies.

Adjust the settings based on what you find and keep tweaking until it feels just right. It will get even better with time.