How to Use Jasper AI for Academic Writing and Essays

Are you looking for a way to make your academic writing easier and faster? If so, then Jasper AI might just be the perfect tool for you.

Powered by the GPT-3.5 language model (of ChatGPT fame), Jasper AI is quickly becoming a popular choice among students who need help with their essays and other written assignments.

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at how using Jasper can help you in writing better essays. Let’s dive right in!

Using Jasper AI for academic writing (tutorial)

There are two ways that Jasper AI can be used for academic writing. Both can be used independently or in conjunction with each other.

The first method is to use templates and the second is to use the document editor. We will take a look at both of them and also discuss the pros and cons of each.

How to use Jasper AI to write essays (Using Templates)

An academic essay can typically be broken down into the following subsections:

1. Introduction
2. Sub-heading 1
3. Sub-heading 2
4. Sub-heading 3
5. …
6. …
7. Conclusion

Fortunately, Jasper AI comes with templates that can help you with each of these subsections.

(Generally, academic essays are not clearly divided into separate sections using sub-headings, so you can delete the sub-heading once you have generated your talking points.)

Let’s try to write an essay on the topic “The impact of video games on youth violence and behavior“.

After logging into the Jasper AI, click on + Create new content and then on + New from template.

You will be presented with this screen:

Scroll down and pick the Blog Post Intro Paragraph template.

Although its name implies that it is for blogs, we can make it work for writing academic papers too, using the tone of voice input field.

I have set the ‘audience‘ field to ‘professors and teachers‘ and ‘tone of voice‘ to ‘Formal and Academic‘.

I recommend generating at least 3 outputs so that you can choose the best one or have to option to merge ideas from all of them.

You can copy whichever output you like and paste it into a document editor such as Google Docs or Jasper’s own editor.

Now that you have your intro paragraph, it’s time to build an outline for your essay. Well, you have a ‘Blog post outline‘ template for it.

Again, just fill in the details and hit generate. You will have 3 sets of outlines to the right.

You can choose any one set or cherry-pick the ideas from all three.

Now, our essay has a skeleton. Each one of these outlines will work as a subsection talking point for your essay.

It’s time to flesh out the details for each subsection. We will use the paragraph generator, template for every sub-heading.

Here’s how to go about it: pick the first subheading, paste it into the template, give it an appropriate tone of voice, and hit generate.

Copy the output you like and paste it into the document editor.

Now do this step for all the subheadings. Remember, you don’t have to just copy one output or don’t have to settle on the first outcome. If you don’t like what Jasper writes, just tweak your input a little bit and hit generate once again.

After you are done with all the subheadings, it’s time to write the conclusion for your blog post.

You can use the “Blog Post Conclusion Paragraph” for this purpose. This template asks you to write your main points.

You can just write in the title of your essay and your outline. Jasper AI will automatically understand what your essay is about and generate a nice conclusion paragraph.

As always, copy it and paste it into the document editor at the end of your content.

By now, you have a pretty decent first draft for your essay. All that remains for you is to edit, proofread, fact-check, and make it your own.

Add the points that you yourself want to convey, delete all the fluff, and remove the words like “blog post”, “post” or other casual phrases that may have crept into it. Use formal words, add transitions between sentences and paragraphs, and finally, refine it to perfection.

At this point, if you feel like you need more help from Jasper AI, you can use the “Content Improver” template.

This template will not add any new material—it only cleans up and rewrites what is already there! This template currently accepts around 5000 characters (~1000 words) at a time.

Limitations of using Jasper.ai templates for writing essays

Using Jasper templates is pretty straightforward. You have templates for almost any use case and there’s virtually no learning curve. However, when it comes to writing essays, templates fall short of being perfect.

For one, they do not cite their sources. Citations are important not only in academic writing but for you also to fact-check the content.

Second, templates are inflexible. You cannot govern their output at all. You cannot tailor its length, nor give it any other special instructions. Also, you cannot edit the output then and there.

These limitations can be overcome if you use Jasper’s in-built document editor for your academic writing.

Jasper AI comes with several templates that can help you write content in any format.

How to Use Jasper for Academic Writing (using document editor)

To get the most flexibility out of Jasper.ai, you can use Jasper’s inbuilt AI-powered document editor which streamlines your entire workflow.

To open a new document, click on + Create new content on the home screen and then on + New document. You will be presented with a blank document with the option to edit the title and description.

These details provide context to Jasper. Any content that it generates in the document editor will be highly affected by what you have written in the Title and the description.

In the content description, I generally write my talking points, kind of like the outline or skeleton of the essay, so that Jasper knows what to write about.

Writing essays using Jasper AI’s Chatbot

Now comes the fun part. The document editor in Jasper is super-powerful; it gives you the ability to not only use templates but also access Jasper Chat, A ChatGPT-like chatbot with internet connectivity.

Here is how you can take advantage of these features — first, make the title of your essay H1 and then choose any of the two modes (either Jasper chat or Power mode for templates):

I have already shown you how to use templates, so I will be using Jasper chat for this example.

Let’s write an introduction using Jasper chat —

To write the introduction, we will have to give it a command (“prompt”). Here’s my prompt for writing an introduction for this essay:

Write me an introduction for an essay on “The impact of video games on youth violence and behavior”. The level of essay is high-school and I want around 200 words. Use formal, academic language only.

As you can see, the AI chatbot allows you to really fine-tune your output. You get the most flexibility and you can customize your input any way you want.

There’s even an enhance prompt button to supercharge your prompts but you don’t need that here for such a simple scenario.

You can just copy the output and paste it into the document editor to the right. The benefit of this approach is that you don’t have to switch any tabs; all the tools that you are working with are right before your eyes.

Now, you just have to give Jasper Chat commands for each part of your essay. For example, to write an outline, give this command:

Write an outline for a high-school essay on “The impact of video games on youth violence and behavior”. The outline should be of 7 points and each point should be the logical successor of the previous point. The tone should be formal.

Jasper AI will come up with an outline for you.

Similarly, you can ask Jasper Chat to generate paragraphs for all the subsections one by one. A good thing about Jasper Chat is that it can access the Internet, so it can provide references or citations.

This command will work just fine:

Write me two paragraphs on “_____________________”. This is a subsection for an essay on “The impact of video games on youth violence and behavior”. I want you to give me citations and references for any facts, theories, thesis, arguements that you rely on in these paragraphs.

Try this prompt for all paragraphs and copy-paste the outputs into the document editor on the right.

And finally, write a conclusion:

I want you to write a conclusion for an essay on “The impact of video games on youth violence and behavior”. This essay talks about these points:

1. _________________
2. _________________
3. _________________
4. _________________

Tie up all the lose ends and make well rounded points. Do not leave any talking point hanging.

(This is just a prompt that I came up with. You can tweak it as per your wish.)

Writing essays using Jasper AI’s document editor

If you don’t want to go through all that trouble of writing prompts into the AI chatbot and then copying the output into the document editor, here’s some good news for you.

You can use all these features within Jasper’s document editor: Using commands.

You can write commands within its document editor and press Cmd + Enter (Ctrl+Enter on Windows).

For example, to write an introduction, you can use this command:

As soon as you press the Cmd + Enter, Jasper will write your essay for you.

The process is really this simple. Just write commands, hit Cmd + Enter and you have the output on your screen.

If at any point you are editing or writing some points yourself and feel like you are stuck, just press Cmd + J (Ctrl + J on Windows) and Jasper.ai will continue writing for you.

While Jasper.ai writes in the document editor, it looks up your title, content description, and about 500 previous words to get a context of what to write, so whatever it writes is pretty relevant to what you are writing.

Now all that remains is to rinse and repeat this process for all sub-tasks of your essay.

Pros and Cons of using document editor for writing essays

The document editor approach gives you far more flexibility. You can tweak the input and the output right there within the editor itself. You can even select a piece of text and ask Jasper to revise or rewrite it if you have Jasper’s browser extension installed.

Also, if you are using the Jasper chat, you get citations, which is another plus point.

However, a little downside of using the document editor over Jasper templates is learning the keyboard shortcuts and ‘prompt engineering’ (How to ask AI to get the best output).

It is uncomfortable for the first few times but you quickly get used to it. Learning Jasper shortcuts is not that big a deal. There are just a couple of them worth your time.

I hope these tips taught you how to write essays and academic papers using Jasper.

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Thanks for reading!