Prompt Playbook: AI Writing Workflow PART 2

Welcome back to our AI Writing Workflow series. Yesterday, we created a basic style guide. Good start but a little crude.

Today, we're taking it up a notch. We're going to feed the AI beast with more of your writing. Adding more fuel to the fire.

Let’s get started

Feeding the Beast: Uploading Your Writing Samples

Why More Content is Better

Remember when we created that style guide yesterday? Well, that was just the appetitiser. Now we're serving up the main course.

There was nothing wrong per se with the style guide. It’s just a starting point that we can improve on a lot.

Here's the deal: the more of your writing you feed into an AI model, the better it can mimic your style. AI, especially generative AI, thrives on massive amounts of data. It’s kinda what makes it work - the more data the better generally.

But we're not just after quantity. We're after quality and relevance too. Put crap in, get crap out. Which brings us to...

Choosing the Right Samples

When it comes to selecting writing samples, here are two golden rules

1. Match the output you want. Want blog articles? Upload your written blog articles. Want Twitter posts? Upload your Twitter posts. The AI will learn from what you give it, so make sure it's learning the right things! Sounds basic but it’s so easy to mess up here.

2. More is better. If in doubt - more! The more writing you give the model, the more it has to work from. It doesn’t have to “fill in the gaps” quite as much because it can look for direction in your work.

Your main task here is to gather up as much writing as possible, preferably all in one document for ease. If you want Tweets or other social media posts you can generally export a csv from the platform. If you want blog articles scrape your own site or do a site export. How you gather it up depends on where the writing is originally.

Next up, we're not just uploading these samples into any old AI. We're going to be picky about our AI model.

Selecting the Right AI Model

Now, you might be thinking, "Can't I just use ChatGPT for this?". It’s a good general workhorse and honestly might be the best tool for the job. But we want to do better.

First up, we want to use a model with a large “context window”. We don’t need to get technical here - think of the context window as the AI's short-term memory. The larger it is, the more of your writing it can consider at once.

You can check what the current models have in terms of context window on this site: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models

Roughly (very roughly) one token is one word in English. So a model with 32k context window can take 32,000 words of English text as your sample. This is rough but as a rule of thumb suffices.

For this task, I recommend Claude (or any large context window model) over ChatGPT. Why? Because we need that big memory to upload as much of your content as possible.

But here's the real secret sauce: try multiple models. Don’t just blindly follow what I say. I’m wrong. A lot. Just don’t tell anyone shh.

The choice of model is the single most important variable here, so don't skip testing. Most have free trials, so you've got nothing to lose.

Why test multiple models? Because your opinion of whether it matches your tone of voice is subjective. Some models you'll read the output and think "ugh, no". I get that with ChatGPT. Others you'll read and think "wow, did it steal a part of my soul?" For me, that's Claude. But it will depend on YOU. It's subjective.

Alright, let's get practical. Here's a prompt you can use to feed your writing samples into an AI model and get it to adhere to your tone of voice:

You are an AI assistant specialised in analysing writing styles and replicating them in future content creation. Your task is to ingest a large amount of writing samples from the user, analyse their unique writing style, and use this analysis to inform all future writing tasks. Follow these steps:

1. Request that the user provide multiple writing samples that best represent their typical writing style. Encourage them to include a variety of content types (e.g., blog posts, social media updates, emails) if they want the AI to be versatile in replicating their style across different formats.

2. Analyse the provided writing samples for the following elements:
   a. Tone (e.g., formal, casual, humorous, authoritative)
   b. Vocabulary preferences and complexity
   c. Sentence structure and length patterns
   d. Use of rhetorical devices (e.g., metaphors, analogies, rhetorical questions)
   e. Paragraph structure and flow
   f. Use of jargon or technical terms
   g. Common phrases or expressions
   h. Punctuation and formatting preferences

3. Create an internal style guide based on this analysis. This guide should include:
   a. Overall tone description
   b. Vocabulary guidelines (including words to use and avoid)
   c. Sentence structure recommendations
   d. Paragraph structure and transitioning tips
   e. Preferred rhetorical devices and how to use them
   f. Guidelines on using jargon or technical terms
   g. List of characteristic phrases or expressions
   h. Punctuation and formatting rules

4. Confirm to the user that you have ingested and analysed their writing samples, and that you are ready to assist with writing tasks in their style.

5. For all future writing tasks, strictly adhere to the analysed style and tone. This means:
   a. Using similar sentence structures and vocabulary complexity
   b. Mimicking the user's tone and level of formality
   c. Incorporating characteristic phrases and expressions where appropriate
   d. Following the user's typical paragraph structure and flow
   e. Using rhetorical devices in a similar manner to the user

6. If asked to write content in a format not present in the original samples, adapt the user's style to that format while maintaining their core writing characteristics.

7. Always be prepared to explain how a piece of writing adheres to the user's style if asked.

This prompt is designed to ingest all the written content you provide and use it for future tasks. It forces the AI to strictly adhere to the tone of voice provided -without explicit instruction our AI can sometimes go off course.

Remember, after uploading your writing samples, you can go ahead with your writing assignment as required. We use this prompt and our uploaded writing samples to prime the task an then go ahead with what we want writing.

In the next Part we discuss co-writing with AI. I'll show you how to work with your AI writing assistant to create content that actually captures your voice. It's not just about style (which we’ve given our AI) - it's about substance too.

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Keep prompting

Kyle