How to ace your first essay this school year

Thanks to Grammarly for sponsoring this video. Welcome back to class, everyone. I hope you all enjoyed your summers. Uh, Gohart. Gohart! Sorry. You had all summer to rest up. Anyways, to celebrate this being the first day of school, I have a special present for everyone. You're retiring. You wish. I actually have your first thousand word essay of the year. Wait, we haven't even learned anything yet. My notebook is completely empty. What are we even going to write about? It's 2,000 words for you now. I feel like many of you are in a similar situation. If so, don't worry. I'm going to help you crush that first essay. But before we begin, I want to welcome you all to the brand new school year. If you're new here, my name is Gohart, and I make those educational shorts that show up on your feed. Be sure to like and subscribe if you want to make this your best year yet. So the essay is one of the trickiest assignments. At least it was for me. Unlike your STEM coursework, which largely tests your ability to memorize and apply different formulas, essays require you to synthesize sources, analyze arguments, and articulate unique insights. But let's not beat around the bush. Regardless of the kind of essay they write, many students today use AI to help. And is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, of course, it depends on how you use it. If you're giving AI your essay prompt and asking it to generate an entire piece for you, then you are doing yourself a disservice. But that's not to say you should avoid AI entirely. When used properly, AI can help you write a stronger essay while still letting you sharpen your own communication ability. And that's what we want. A tool that empowers us to craft compelling pieces without undermining our own ability to write. And luckily, that's where our sponsor Grammarly comes in. It's an AI writing partner that can help you through the entire writing process. They partnered with me on this whole video to take you through a bunch of their newest features, which can help you get good grades with confidence and integrity. Let's see how these features can help you at the beginning of the writing process, during the writing process, and at the end of the writing process. Now, the first step of the writing process is brainstorming. Let's say we have the following prompt. Climate change solutions require balancing economic growth and environmental protection. Analyze two different strategies for addressing climate change and argue which is more viable in the long term. Now, this is where AI can be incredibly useful in the right way. Let me show you how. So let's start by heading to appdivegrammarly.com and clicking on New Doc. Next, let's toggle one of their newest features called AI Chat. Let's go ahead and click on Start Brainstorming and ask it to help us understand the different kinds of strategies for addressing climate change. Very quickly, it gives us a list of specific, widely recognized approaches. We can then conduct our own independent research on these topics or ask Grammarly for more details. Tell me more about geoengineering. Using AI Chat can be a great way to wrap your mind around certain topics and gather the high-level points. And then finally, we can ask AI Chat to give us an outline for an essay that compares geoengineering to mitigation. And there we go. We have a comprehensive structure that we can modify and work with. Now, let's say an hour goes by and you're cruising along with your essay. And in case you need a refresher, there are three main components of the essay. The introduction, the body paragraphs, and the conclusion. The introduction should hook the reader, provide just enough context, and present your thesis, which is your central argument or point. And think of each body paragraph as its own mini-essay with a claim, supported by some evidence, and backed by analysis. And finally, the conclusion should leave the reader convinced and thinking. You should restate your thesis in fresh words, synthesize the key points, and leave an impact with a thought-provoking idea or question. And that brings me to the next feature, reader's reaction. Whereas the other two features focus on your instructors and domain experts, this feature focuses on the general public. It tries to predict what the everyday reader will remember and what they might ask. And then based on these predictions, it suggests revisions to make your writing more effective. Let's see it in action. Right away, it tells us that the text clearly explains complex climate solutions, but could offer more practical implications and everyday relevance. Then underneath, it tells us what readers might remember. For example, that geoengineering and mitigation are the main climate change strategies, and that mitigation addresses root causes and offers long-term economic and health benefits. Now below these, we can see what readers might ask. For example, how do these strategies affect individuals' daily lives or choices? What are the most effective mitigation actions that governments and citizens can support right now? And are there any real-world examples or pilot projects of geoengineering currently underway? Based on these questions, Grammarly gives us suggestions for our piece. For example, we could connect this first paragraph to everyday life by mentioning how these strategies might influence daily life, jobs, or consumer choices. Now if we're unsure how to do so, we could click on show example for some inspiration. And if we like what we see, we can click insert example to update our essay. But use your judgment here. These suggestions are based on the everyday reader. These probably aren't changes you need to make if you're submitting your essay for an academic purpose. But it turns out this feature lets you change the audience. If you go ahead and click on this box, you can change the audience to an instructor, policymaker, environmental activist, and even business leaders. This way, you can tailor the feedback to who you're writing for. Let's go ahead and select environmental activist and see what happens. And there we go. It's now telling us to highlight activist roles within the first paragraph. And another way we can appeal to this group is by sounding more passionate, which is where the paraphraser comes in. If we activate the paraphraser, we see that it says our essay is balanced and informative. But the tone could be more concise and direct for greater impact. It then gives us a list of writing styles we can use, such as humanized, academic, professional, and streamlined. But if we're trying to appeal to environmental activists, our goal is to sound passionate. So let's click on create a voice and add that in, along with a few examples so it knows what tone to use. Then once we click create voice, we start getting some suggestions here on the sidebar. For example, we can highlight human impact and urgency. If we're happy with the paraphrased text, we simply have to click on accept to update our essay. And there we go. The text has been updated. This tool does a great job capturing the essence of what we want to sound like while staying true to the substance of our original piece. So those five tools should help you crush the writing process itself. But we also have some tools that can help us when we're done. As we all know, one of the most important parts of the writing process is the site sources that support our claims. But it's just as important to look for sources that oppose it. An effective writer is someone who doesn't just blindly accept supporting materials, but rather pokes at it and tries to find holes. Their goal isn't to write for the sake of writing or to thrust their one-sided argument onto the world. No, their role is that of a curious skeptic. And luckily, Grammarly's Citation Finder can help you be that curious skeptic. This tool checks your arguments by looking online for supporting and opposing evidence and provides ready-to-use citations for anything it finds. Let's see how it works. Once we click on Citation Finder, it starts scanning the internet for claims and sources. Here it finds seven claims in our piece, none of which we've cited. If we hover over this first claim, we see some supporting text from the EPA website, which we can quickly cite by clicking this button. But if we go down lower, we'll see a debated claim. Now this is something we could also cite or something that we can look deeper into. And finally, one thing your instructors will look deeper into is AI usage. As we've seen throughout this video, Grammarly isn't replacing the writing process for us, but helping us along the way. But just in case you're worried your essay might get flagged as AI, we can run the AI Detector, which is a Grammarly Pro feature. Now very quickly, it flags several parts of our essay and allows us to cite them if we just so happen to be using generative AI. And if that's the case, we can click on Generate Citation to cite it using Grammarly's free Citation Generator. And with that, we've wrapped up this video. Grammarly helps you with your writing from beginning to end to get good grades, making it a must-have for all students. Sign up and get Grammarly today and upgrade to Pro for 20% off using my link. Huge thanks to them for sponsoring this entire video, and thank you for watching as our sponsors help keep this channel running. I wish you all the best of school year, and I'll see you again next week.