Mastering Writing Techniques by Blending AI with Style #AIwriting

In a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence (AI), harnessing the power of AI tools to enhance your writing style can be a game-changer.

The problem is that large language models like ChatGPT have their own unique writing style that is generic and bland. It feels vanilla; lacking any personality in its voice. When I encounter a piece written in this genetic style, my “ChatGPT-generated” alarm goes off, and I avoid reading that piece. To me it feels that if the author did not invest the time to write it, why should I read it?

So is it possible to use ChatGPT assistance without losing your unique style, without triggering potential readers? The answer is yes.

This article gives you valuable insights into how you can develop and refine your writing style using AI models like GPT. You’ll learn the process of extracting, mimicking, and blending writing styles to create compelling and distinctive content.

Before you learn how to extract your own style, let’s try out some of the existing styles according to different famous personalities. You’ll start to get an idea of how much difference a writing style makes.

Here’s my prompt:

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Notice that before applying different writing styles, I give ChatGPT a few important pieces of instruction: “extract most relevant information”, “write a LinkedIn post”, and finally, “announcing this exciting news.” It’s important to include this type of context to set a specific tone.

Here’re some of the responses:

Notice how the “regular style” is lacking personality, unlike all others, like them or not.

But what about your personal style? As ChatGPT isn’t familiar with it, we’ll need to teach it your style.

You might wonder: How can AI learn your distinct style? The answer lies in providing a language model with examples of your previous work, such as articles or blog posts. By feeding it these samples, the model learns to recognize and crystallize your distinctive style. It comprehends your vocabulary choices, understands your preferred tone and grasps the sentence structure you tend to use.

Here’s my prompt:

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Ok, let me break it down and explain what you just saw:

• Step 1: As you won’t be able to put a long text into a single prompt, I first prepare ChatGPT for what’s coming, without mentioning anything about the style.
• Step 2: Paste one piece after another starting each piece with the predefined header (in my case “Article #1”). I don’t recommend sending too many pieces.
• Step 3: Now provide the instruction to extract the style of the text. Here’s my prompt:

“Based on the articles you received, I want you to give me a full description of the linguistic style, vocabulary use and tone used in these articles. Use a lot of detail and be very specific. I want to know things like the tone, the structure used, and other things along these lines to be able to tell ChatGPT to recreate a script in that style. Don’t talk about the subject of these articles, focus only on the style and all the elements that would help a language model recreate it.”

Notice that I described different components of writing style, such as vocabulary and tone. I also asked it to avoid mentioning the topic of the articles, but only extract the style.

• Step 4: ChatGPT provided me with almost a full page of text describing my style. Copy it and save it for future use.

An interesting exercise would be to apply your style to a piece of content. See if you like the result. In the sections below you will learn how to do this.

Once you’ve successfully extracted your baseline style, the next step is to enhance it. One powerful technique is to blend your style with that of a prominent author or influencer whose style you admire.

Since there are so many choices, I decided to let ChatGPT discover who my style is similar to:

All right! Apparently my writing style resembles Malcolm Gladwell!

OK, let’s now use my baseline style and enhance it with the target style.

Now you have your enhanced style.

It’s time to apply it to a piece of content and see if it works!

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And the result is:

Well, it’s not exactly a crisp and short LinkedIn post… I guess this style is more suitable for longer pieces.

But not everything is lost. You can always counterbalance your style with a contrasting style.

Let’s try this:

Somewhat unsurprisingly, ChatGPT recommended I contrast my verbose writing style with Ernest Hemingway’s notoriously concise style.

Let’s see if it blends:

Now you’ve got your style mixed with Ernest Hemingway.

Now that you’ve extracted and refined your writing style using AI, the next step is to apply it to new content. It can be an official document, such as your company’s press release; a book summary, an opinion piece, or anything else.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with different styles, even those of less well-known individuals. You can achieve this by transcribing their content or utilizing publicly available materials. This experimentation can lead to surprising and innovative results, giving your writing a unique edge.

In a world where content creation is increasingly automated, leveraging AI to refine and personalize your writing style is a powerful tool for writers and content creators. By following the techniques I’ve outlined in this article, you can extract, mimic, blend, and experiment with different writing styles, ultimately elevating your ability to engage and captivate your audience, without triggering a “ChatGPT generated” alarm.

So go ahead, experiment, blend, and craft your unique writing style with the aid of AI. Your creative journey has just taken an exciting turn, and the possibilities are endless.