How to Train AI to Write in Your (Academic) Style

During my last webinar on writing with AI, one of the most common questions was how to make AI write so it sounds like you and not like generic and overly diplomatic ChatGPT text. To achieve this, we can use AI to create a style blueprint, an instruction set on how to write like you or someone else. This blueprint can then transform any text into the style you want.

In this post, we’ll explore how you can train AI to write like you using a straightforward strategy that analyzes your writing and creates a “style blueprint” out of it that you can then use wherever you want. This strategy is covered in the Effortless AI course in more depth, as well. Here are the steps:

1. Gather some writing you want to analyze (e.g. your/someone else’s manuscripts).
2. Use an AI prompt to read these documents and create a concise description of the language using a set of descriptive adjectives: The Style Blueprint.
3. Copy and paste your “Com Blueprint” to a prompt, custom instructions or a CustomGPT.

But first, an example:

The Style Blueprint Method in Action

Let’s see an example first. I used AI to analyze a paper by a scientist I really admire and whose papers have a distinctive style: Nathan G. Swenson, an ecology professor currently working at the University of Notre Dame. Now I asked ChatGPT to write one paragraph on the reasons for climate change with and without his “style blueprint”, here’s the result:

Notice how the vanilla paragraph on the left has been transformed into something that sounds like an introduction to a scientific paper, written with confidence (e.g., “…unequivocally demonstrates…”) and personality. The only difference here is that I copied and pasted a one-paragraph style blueprint below the prompt. Let’s build that style blueprint.

Step 1: Gather representative writing to a text file

Gather a few representative pieces of content. In the academic field, the manuscripts with the most stylistic variation are books (due to their length), introduction (for style) and the discussion (for personality) sections, as they give academics the most freedom to express themselves. Keep your writing samples to a minimum, as more content often gives worse results as AI doesn’t necessarily read/use all of it. Focus on parts that you found most remarkable.

For this example, I just copied this paper into a text file. The Gobble bot can combine multiple files into a single text file for this purpose.

Step 2: Generate the Style Blueprint

To generate the blueprint, we will need to analyze the text. Here is a prompt:

I need you to create a style blueprint based on the text examples I am providing. Describe the style of writing in a few sentences, mention these attributes: Conciseness, Eloquence, Vividness, Assertiveness, word choice, jargon, sentence length, <add or remove adjectives as needed>.
Here is the text example: 
"""<Paste your text here>"""

The key here is to ask ChatGPT about the right attributes. Just “describe this text” usually gives very poor results. Here’s why I chose these attributes:

• Conciseness, jargon, sentence length: Control the structure making the text more “academic”.
• Vividness, assertiveness, eloquence: Control the “feel of the writing” and impact of the arguments.
• Word choice: Helps replicate the writer’s personality, as we all have favourite words and expressions that we commonly use.

You need to play around with the set of attributes you provide. Every domain will likely emphasize different attributes. For an academic audience, you will choose different words than to replicate the style of emails you write.

You can replace or expand the attributes in the prompt above to suit your needs. But next, let’s look at the results:

The default answer to this prompt is a lengthy text and it helps build the context for the AI and for you to double-check if your task has been understood correctly. Rerun the script if you feel the answer does not suit you.

To get the finished writing blueprint we need to condense this into a single paragraph using the following prompt:

Compact this into a set of instructions for AI that can be used to replicate this writing style. Do not use lists, just a paragraph. 

And here is the finished style blueprint in the style of Nathan Swensons 2014 paper:

There are a few key things to notice in the style blueprint:

1. The style blueprint is imperative (“write with…”, “use this…”).
2. It is concise, this is important as it makes it easier for AI to follow the instructions.
3. It mentions the audience (e.g. “…scientific argumentation…”)
4. It contains many adjectives that will help the AI to implement the instructions.

You can further refine your blueprint by using examples and catch phrases the person uses, explicitly specifying the audience you are writing for and playing around with different texts and attributes.

Step 3: Using the Style Blueprint

The blueprint itself is just a paragraph of text that you can plug anywhere you like. ChatGPT currently offers four options to add customization:

1. Simply, copy and paste the com blueprint under your prompts.
2. Use “Custom Instructions” to globally change the style ChatGPT talks to you
3. Create a ChatGPT project and specify custom instructions there to use the style for select conversations.
4. Create a CustomGPT assistant that will help you with academic writing and contains additional instructions.

Can I train ChatGPT to write like me?

Using Global Custom Instructions to specify AI writing style

If you want to change the way ChatGPT always talks to you. Click your icon on the top right, select “Customize ChatGPT” and add the style blueprint into the popup.

This will affect all new chats.

Using ChatGPT Projects to specify AI writing style for a few conversations

Better than globally changing custom instructions to adjust style is to create a ChatGPT project, which is a container for chats with its own custom instructions and even a set of files the AI can refer to. I use ChatGPT projects to speed up my writing and you can learn how in this course. To create a new project click on “New Project” in the sidebar.

I tend to create projects for every research idea I have and group a few papers on this topic to answer targeted questions. You can create a project just for your academic writing, upload your manuscript and add the style blueprint to have in-depth conversations.

Using your Style Blueprint in a CustomGPT

One of the best tools to customize your AI experience are so-called CustomGPTs or assistants, that you can build yourself. A CustomGPT is just normal ChatGPT with the addition of a few files as a knowledge base and detailed descriptions about how it should respond. Both of these can be used to upload your style blueprint.

Creating CustomGPTs can be very simple, but getting them to do precisely what you want can be tricky. Check out this tutorial on building CustomGPTs for academics.

If you’re curious to try out a ChatGPT bot that will help you with your writing, I wrote one for myself that is publicly available, too: Writing Wanda.

Summary

Training AI to write in your style is easy:

1. Get a few pieces of text that contain good examples of how you write.
2. Use the provided prompt to generate a “style blueprint” adding more adjectives to describe aspects of writing you care about (e.g. sentence length, formality ,etc)
3. Use this style blueprint in addition to a prompt or as custom instructions to build a customGPT assistant that helps you write in this style.