Artificial intelligence has brought a new level of convenience and efficiency to our lives, changing the way we tackle essay-writing tasks. These tools can produce content quickly and accurately, making them a go-to option for students who want to save time and work smarter.
According to Campus Technology, Turnitin, a widely used AI detection tool, has revealed a growing trend among students using AI to write their papers. By March 2024, it had analyzed over 200 million papers, finding that nearly 22 million contained at least 20% AI-generated content. Shockingly, more than 6 million papers were found to be 80% or more AI-written.
However, the dependence on AI-generated essays raises significant concerns about academic integrity, originality, and personal development. While AI can certainly streamline essays, students need to maintain their voice, ideas, and critical thinking skills.
In this article, we’ll explore nine practical tips from experts to help students avoid using AI for essay writing and ensure their work remains authentic and reflects their abilities.
9 Tips to Avoid AI While Writing Essays
AI has become one of the most powerful and potentially dangerous tools of the modern age. According to Global Business Outlook, over 50% of students regularly use generative AI tools like ChatGPT, and 75% say they would continue using them even if their schools threatened to ban them.
While efficient, AI tools still produce generic and formulaic content that lacks the personal insights and critical thinking necessary for academic success. By relying on AI-generated content, students risk compromising the authenticity and uniqueness of their work.
So, as a student, you must avoid using AI to write essays. However, if you find it difficult to write yourself, you can ask human writers to “write my essay for me” to compose an AI and plagiarism-free paper. These experts employ human knowledge and expertise with unique voices and understanding of matters in your essays.
If you wish to create high-quality essays that reflect your style and perspective, find below some expert tips on how to ensure your writing remains genuine and original.
1. Emphasise Creativity
Emphasizing creativity in the story is an important strategy to maintain originality and prevent artificial intelligence in your documents. AI cannot simply replace the human touch by adding original viewpoints, innovative ideas, and artistic content. This may include giving impressive theories or examples of your critical thinking or using metaphors, analogies, or storytelling ways to illustrate points.
Being creative in this way makes your story stand out, draws readers in, and helps them connect more with your ideas. Moreover, the use of creative techniques allows one to approach the story from multiple angles, giving life and memorability to the work.
2. Add Personal Touch
By including a personal touch and ensuring it is unique and innovative, you can make your essay stand out from the AI-generated content. You can use all your experiences, thoughts, and feelings to create honest, creative stories.
Here are a few ways to do it:
- Connect the theme of your essay to personal experiences.
- Back your claims with logic and examples for credibility.
- Use analogies, comedy, or narrative to bring life to your ideas.
- Talk about the lessons you’ve learnt or how the subject has changed your viewpoint.
By adding your own experiences and originality to the topic, you can eliminate boredom and express your individuality. This will make your writing more interesting and impact your readers.
3. Conduct In-Depth Research
Thorough research is a major strategy for ensuring originality and authenticity in your papers and effectively avoiding the use of AI for writing essays. By studying credible sources such as scholarly publications, novels, and first-hand recollections, you can gain unique insights and a sound foundation for your arguments.
Moreover, thorough research helps you produce unique viewpoints rather than relying on general or superficial data that most AI systems plagiarise. Oxford Royale advised evaluating the other side of the argument before over depending on one source.
To create a fair argument in a paper, you should research a lot of the different views about the topic you are writing on. Finally, well-researched content demonstrates your work and experience, which means that your writing will be different and matter.
4. Avoid Repetitions
To make your writing interesting, eliminating repetition in your essay ensures AI-generated content is less likely to sound formulaic or robotic. Repetition can make your message less effective and appeal less to your readers. You might remain fresh and retain the interest of your reader by using different terminologies and concepts.
To avoid AI for essay writing, you may:
- Use a range of vocabulary and synonyms.
- Pay attention to special features.
- Revise for redundancies.
- Use different sentence structures.
Thus, this technique helps your writing avoid the predictability often associated with AI outputs, making it more interesting and assuredly reading like a thoughtful, creative approach to the work.
5. Use Descriptive Prompts
Distinguishing between content produced using AI and the content of human writing has become very challenging in this digital world. To avoid this problem, instructors and writers can use annotations to make writing more creative and original.
Furthermore, this method creates stimuli that force students to think deeply and come up with the correct answer, thus stimulating thinking that is problematic for AI algorithms to simulate. “Describe in detail” or “describe how something looked/felt/smelled/tasted” are some examples of terms used widely in descriptive essay writing. It can be helpful to think about how anything impacts the five senses when writing descriptively.
Key Benefits of Using Descriptive Prompts
- Critical Thinking requires that a student evaluate and comprehend data, which AI cannot emulate since it thinks differently.
- They promote thorough explanations of situations, occurrences, or ideas.
- These prompts improve the style, coherence, and organization of a given descriptive essay.
- Improves comprehension by offering a thorough assessment of students’ learning, not just memory.
6. Rewrite Your Content
Rewriting is the most essential strategy for ensuring that your work is original and does not have easily identifiable trends common to AI-generated texts. Editing your first draft and reviewing it again can help make it original and clearer, transforming the content to your desired message.
Additionally, rewriting your essay allows you to give it a more authentic and effective tone by removing any cliches and changing what you thought about your arguments.
Effective Techniques For Content Rewriting
- Avoid quoting the same passages from all your sources, although they are properly referenced.
- If necessary, use conversational expressions and your common way of speaking instead of being overly formal or sounding like a robot.
- During every rephrase, focus on providing new ideas.
- Take comments from mentors and peers to revise and polish your work.
Your first draft now transforms into a polished piece of writing, which will appeal to readers as you edit your work. Writing essays without the use of AI enriches your paper’s uniqueness and coherence and fits the writing to your voice.
7. Incorporate Your Analysis
One of the most significant ways to avoid AI in writing essays and guarantee your article is unique, intelligent, and interesting is by using your analysis. By travelling beyond summarization and into critical analysis or personal insights, you can demonstrate a better understanding of the matter and a tailored approach.
This approach clearly aims to make your writing unique by demonstrating your ability to use critical thought and present your perspective.
The University of Michigan provided some questions that can elicit critical thinking and lead to a high-quality analysis if one asks himself.
- What do I need to explain to the reader about the origin of this evidence?
- Does evidence have a history?
- What historical context may have contributed to the formation of this evidence?
- What do I want my audience to note or pay attention to in this evidence?
- What made me choose this particular piece of evidence?
- In what ways does this evidence support or refute my claim? Does it do both?
- What factors make this evidence significant in some contexts but not in others?
8. Proofread and Revise Manually
In the current digital era, the trick to using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to assist with drafting can be very overwhelming. However, it is important to maintain the originality and authenticity of your work.
Manually editing and revising text as you write an article is a great way of dealing with AI because this approach greatly enhances the quality of the content while fostering growth in writing and critical thinking skills.
The advantages of the manual editing and proofing process are as follows:
- Increased accuracy
- Improved clarity
- Enhance writing and critical thinking
9. Seek Help from Human Essay Writers
Getting help from human essay writers can make a big difference when you want your essay to feel authentic and personal. Unlike AI, real writers understand the subtle details of language and can shape your ideas into something meaningful and unique. They’ll work with your tone, help organize your thoughts, and make sure your essay flows naturally. Plus, you can have real conversations, ask questions, and get feedback that helps you grow as a writer. It’s a great way to ensure your work truly represents you.
AI might not always pick up on the subtle differences in your tone, but trusted essay writing companies in the UK can help. They can write, edit and proofread your essay to ensure it stays true to your voice while making your ideas clear and convincing. Getting feedback like this is a great way to improve your writing and make it feel more natural and polished.
Wind Up
Essay writing using AI is gaining popularity. Therefore, it’s essential to know how to avoid using this kind of technology. This article discusses the top nine ways to avoid using such tools for writing essays. Although it is challenging to create or be creative in relevant disciplines like literature, journalism, or marketing, the human touch brings with it specific skills to infuse uniqueness and personal insight into the paper.
Additionally, human writers can offer critical thinking and original views, which readers can relate to; there is no way AI can do for writing essays, depending on patterns and algorithms. Finally, creativity with the writer’s voice and a deep understanding of the subject shines through; the work will stand out.
