As AI begins to take over our thinking about writing, with the rise of careers or skill sets like “prompt engineer,” I have been thinking about the ways in which I have in the past, and I will continue in the future, to prompt myself in terms of excavating my own knowledge in my areas of expertise.
If I’m thinking about, for example, what kind of blog post to write? It helps to come up with the right question to ask myself to prompt that thinking about topic.
What do I know?
If I’m looking to write a blog post about content marketing, that’s a broad topic. So I might ask myself first: what are subtopics within content marketing that I can write a blog post about?
When I come up with the topics via brainstorming, it’s often like AI: if I came up with 10, possibly 7 would be unoriginal that I’ve heard of before or used before, and 2 would hold promise, and one would be great. (I just can’t come up with them in 30 seconds; I suppose that’s the AI time savings).
So the one goes into my to-write list, for the two decent ones I might think about how to boost them to a better idea, and for a few of the seven as well.
Outline my knowledge
So then for the topic, let’s be meta here and say the topic is AI, I would prompt myself by thinking, okay, what do I know about AI? What articles have I read recently? What are the points of view and have I settled on my own POV?
Then I might start doing some research and reading more, but my own brain has produced a starting point or an angle on the research. It might even be enough to develop an outline to fill in.
So that’s another way to call on the knowledge that you might already have, to find ideas from my own mental computer.
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