Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT with TextExpander

When most people think of ChatGPT for writing, they imagine the AI doing all the work. But writing teacher and screenwriter Ryan Briggs opened our eyes to a whole new way to use ChatGPT for writing.

“I write arthouse sci-fi. Think of movies like Ex Machina, Her, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I look at those films as spiritual siblings to the kind of writing I do,” Ryan says. Ryan is seeking a new agent, so check out his portfolio if you’re in the market.

In addition to writing screenplays and teaching the art to others at Cal State LA, Ryan has mastered an emerging art form: prompt engineering.

It’s not enough to tell a language model like ChatGPT to write a sonnet, at least if you want the expected results. You have to give ChatGPT verbose instructions, almost like writing a computer program, only in English instead of a programming language. A prompt like “write me a sonnet to a woman named Hannah in the style of Shakespeare” will give you more-predictable results.

Ryan and his students use TextExpander to save and refine their ChatGPT prompts, which they then use to analyze and improve their writing. Ryan has created elaborate prompts that evaluate scenes, identify key plot points, and give instant feedback.

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