A Week with AI

One thing people often ask me about is how to use AI. For many, it still feels too complicated and not worth the effort. To help you figure out how you might use AI, I’m sharing four practical examples from my work as a freelance editor.

Note: If you use AI for client work, make sure to ask your client if they permit AI, follow their policy for using it, and select the “Opt out of data usage for training” setting on your AI tool to ensure that the text you input is not used for training in AI's netherworld.

1. Writing More Concisely

When I write, I try to get my ideas out and then clean them up when I edit. I certainly don’t mind editing my own work (that’s what I do for a living 😊), but sometimes I want some help.   

Here is an example of text I wrote for this blog post. As you can see, the last sentence in this paragraph is very wordy:

To help you figure out how you might use AI, I’m sharing with you how I recently used AI. These are real-life examples. On that note: If you use AI for client work, make sure you have asked your client if they allow AI, that you follow your client’s rules for using AI, and that you have selected the “Opt out of data usage for training” setting on whatever AI tool you use (so that you are not using the text you are inputting into the AI nether world where it can be used for training).

For this kind of work, I often turn to editGPT (see my blog post Using editGPT with Word for more information on this tool). I find editGPT easy to use, and I like that I can see its changes. In editGPT, I selected the “Natural” button so that it only fixed the awkward parts. Here are the results:

Revised Sentence in editGPT

I liked most of the suggestions but not all. I liked my phrase “AI’s netherworld” (I fixed my misspelling), so I kept that in, accepted most of the other changes, added a few of my own edits, and then copied and pasted that text into my blog post, which you’ve already read. It is the second paragraph in this blog post, the one that starts with Note.

2. Making Lists Parallel

I’m working on a teacher resource book that includes 50 preschool activities with lists of materials for teachers and children. I would like the bulleted lists to follow a similar format, such as this:

Materials for each child and teacher

• 2–3 small cars

• Materials for building ramps, such as pieces of sturdy cardboard or long cardboard tubes, or 3–5 flexible car tracks

• Blocks to prop up one side of the ramp

• Tape

• Basket to hold materials

However, I often come across lists like this (I’ve underlined the errors so you can quickly see them):

Materials for each child and teacher

• Two to three small cars

• Add materials for building ramps, such as pieces of sturdy cardboard or long cardboard tubes, or 3 to 5 flexible car tracks.

• blocks to prop up one side of the ramp

• Be sure to have measuring tools available.

• basket to hold materials

Here’s my prompt to ChatGPT. As you can see, I included specific instructions as well as examples of what I like and don’t like (see the text in the green square boxes):

Prompt for Parallel Lists

Here is what ChatGPT returned to me, and it even corrected a misspelled word (underlined in green):

ChatGPT’s Output for Parallel List Prompt

What I like about this prompt is that I can easily return to it with a new list, type in “Please do the same for this list,” and copy in the new text.

Writing a good prompt takes time, but it’s worth it. When you give your AI tool clear instructions along with examples of what you do (and don’t) want, the quality of the output improves significantly.

3. Creating a Macro

I'm working on a book for early childhood educators that includes 15 chapters by different authors. In general, my client prefers early childhood education rather than child care, but sometimes child care is the correct term given the context.

I could use Word’s find-and-replace function, but then I would need to stop each time it finds child care to read and reread the sentence to understand the context. I would prefer to run a macro on each chapter to highlight child care before I start reading, so I can address that issue while editing. Here’s my prompt to ChatGPT:

Prompt for a Macro That Highlights a Term

I then copied the macro and tested it. The macro didn’t work. I returned to my original ChatGPT prompt, informed it that it didn't work (and explained how it didn't), and then asked it to fix the macro. ChatGPT apologized for its mistake and provided me with a new macro. I deleted the old macro, copied in the new macro, and tested it again. It worked!  

4. Drafting an Email from Notes

I often provide developmental editing for book-length manuscripts. Although I work directly with the publisher (rather than the authors), I always write a memo to the author.

While I was doing the developmental edit (DE), I jotted down notes in a draft email to my publisher about things the copyeditor would need to address in the next round. By the end of the edit, my draft email looked like this:

Hello! Attached please find the DE for Name of Book. I have also included the DE memo, a style list, and a revised table of contents. The copyeditor will want to:

Missing serial comma

Passive voice

Single quotes instead of double quotes

Way too many exclamation points

Au doesn’t consistently use italics and bold; uses both for emphasis; needs to be more consistent

Au doesn’t follow parallel structure in bulleted lists

The notes make sense to me but probably not to anyone else. I then asked ChatGPT to help me translate my notes into a more logical list:

Revised Email to Publisher

The bulleted lists in the green boxes highlight the original and revised text.

AI doesn’t have to be a mystery. These are just four small ways I used it this week, and none of them required coding or deep technical knowledge. If something here sparked an idea for you, try it out. Start small, and don’t be afraid to experiment.

What’s one way you might try AI in your work this week?

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