Today’s Plan:
- Tell Me About the Document You Will Be Editing
- Developing a Prompt Engineering Editing Manual
- For Next Session
Tell Me About the Document You Will Be Editing
What is your “target document”: Academic writing? Professional report? Essay? Journalism? Short story? Poetry?
Developing a Prompt Engineering Editing Manual
The goal for today’s class is to develop a Prompt Engineering Editing Manual (the PEEM). I want us one set of procedures that everyone will follow as they revise their target document. We will make this document flexible so that it can accommodate both academic, professional, or creative writing projects (though I think poetry will be harder than prose).
We are going to base the PEEM on the document Jordan Smith provided me, Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Lab’s 1980 The Levels of Edit. I will break you up into five teams:
- Team One: JPL Language Edit (items 1, 2, 3, 7*, 9) Shellee, Amber
- Team Two: Warriner’s Grammar “Usage” Jaiden, Luna,
- Team Three: JPL Structural Edit (items 1, 2, 3*, 5, 7, 8) Sam, Matt, Lauren,
- Team Four: JPL Structural Edit (items 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15) Beth, Jacinda,
- Team Five: Warriner’s “Creative Writing” and “Description of a Character” Rose, Deeds, Wyatt
Teams 1, 3, and 4, your team assignment is to transform whatever instruction you find in the JPL into an instructive prompt that can be copy/pasted into ChatGPT. Each item has to be transformed into a creative and non-creative prompt.
Team 2, your assignment is to develop 5-7 “usage” prompts out of the Warriner’s Grammar manual. In some cases, you might simply use the table of contents, others might require you actually flip to those sections.
Team 5, your assignment is to develop 5-7 “creative” prompts out of the Warriner’s Grammar manual.
Because I think having 5 teams work simultaneously in the same Google Doc might be a bit too chaotic, I will ask you to develop your work separately and move it into my master Google Doc near the end of class.
For Next Session
Turn in a copy of your un-edited target document to Canvas.
Run a test for me. Take any document other than the one you want to use for this project and run it through a part of the PEEM. Afterwards, feel free to suggest an edit in Google Docs, to leave a comment, or to write a new potential prompt.
Finally, I want you to develop a prompt for the PEEM. It can be specific to a particular genre (academic, fiction, poetry) or generic. I will develop an example below.
I would like you to suggest 5 potential opening lines for this story. It is okay if one or two of those suggestions are taken from another part of this story. At least 3 of the suggestions should be original. I prefer opening lines that dramatically introduce a person, describe with detail, clarity, and intrigue an object or place of significance to the story, or create a mystery, perhaps by coming out of left field and disorienting the reader a bit.
Note: I used to teach a great essay on first lines and revision called “Killing the Babies and Captivating First Sentences” by Footnote Maven, but apparently the Internet ate that article. The above prompt was based on something close to it, “Hooked! Writing Killer Opening Lines” by Eric Scot Tryon.
