12 Tips for Generating Writing Prompts for Writing Using AI

Next time you’re in class, take a look at how many students are typing a text, sending an email, posting on social media, for all of these students have found prompts for writing even though you, the teacher, didn’t assign them anything to write.  

Always texting, typing, communicating

Indeed, it seems that students (being connected to others and to the Internet almost constantly) are writing more than ever; it’s just that their student writing prompts these days aren’t always the kind found in the classroom.  

This isn’t just about a teacher giving prompts for paragraph writing or prompts for writing a story.  No, instead, the students’ exigence–that’s a fancy rhetorical term for what gives rise to a text–is more authentic and frequent as they communicate in real-time with real-world audiences.  

The question and challenge for us, then, as educators is how can we bring this same level of investment, engagement, and consequence to the classroom and the prompts for writing we 1) want to assign students because we feel it’s good for their mind, body, or soul or 2) need to assign students due to curricular needs and things outside of our autonomous control?

What is a Prompt for Writing?

Before we look at how to create an effective prompt for writing, let’s begin with the basics: A prompt for writing for students is essentially anything that gives the students direction, inspiration, or motivation to write or to respond to an audience in a given situation.  

Prompts for writing can take many forms from giving students a list of topics for free writing or for opinion writing to giving more specific prompts for persuasive writing, prompts for informative writing, or prompts for descriptive writing.  

In short, anything can be a writing prompt…

For example, I could give my students some ideas for writing in a journal to ask them to reflect on the hardest thing they’ve ever done or to write about an emotion they’re feeling with final exams around the corner.  

I could give prompts for creative writing short stories by giving students the climax of a narrative and asking them to write the rest of the story or I could ask them to write a story about a character who faces a tough choice and makes the wrong decision.  

I could also pose questions for writing prompts like Which is more beneficial to a person in life: the pursuit of happiness or the attainment of happiness? or To what extent is a college education important today?

Prompts for writing can be formal or informal, too.  For instance, as a bellringer to begin class, I might have an informal prompt for writing asking the students to take five minutes to write out everything they know (or think they know) about the subject of the day’s lesson.  Or, more formally, students find prompts on things like standardized tests where they might find prompts like these AP English Language and Composition prompts.

So, either formal or informal, for a teacher or for a test, topics for writing are meant to help students show their writing and communication skills in a given situation. 

Let’s then look at how we can find or create the best prompts.

Using AI to Generate Prompts for Writing

Google used to be our co-teacher, for we’d lean into a Google Search to help us with lesson designs.  Let’s say I needed a writing prompt for The Great Gatsby.  What’d I do?  I’d Google it.  I’d see what questions for writing prompts were out there already.  What’d SparkNotes have to say?  What PDFs could I mine that showed up in the search results?  

This was helpful in two ways: 

1) we could take inspiration from (or just take) what we found to help us with our lessons, and 

2) we could see what our students had access to.  

This second point is an important one, for if the Internet has it, we can assume our students have it, too.  And if we want to truly assess what our students know and can do, we need to design writing prompts that are as authentic and unique as possible, so they don’t have the answers at their fingertips–but they do have the interest to write.

Perhaps, then, using AI (like ChatGPT) is a better way to create or find prompts for writing.  Rather than relying on the static Internet, let’s try out the dynamic chatbot and generate more original content.

Look below for 12 tips for generating writing topics using AI:

1. Theme Exploration.  If you are teaching a specific text, you can ask an AI chatbot to create writing prompts centered on the specific text.  If you are exploring a theme across multiple texts, you can use the chatbot to create questions for writing prompts centered on specific themes.
2. Character Roulette.  You can use AI to create random character profiles, complete with quirks and backgrounds, inspiring students to build stories around these diverse characters, which would be a good prompt for creative writing short stories.
3. Historical Remix.  You can have AI suggest historical events and figures, challenging students to reimagine these scenarios with a creative twist.
4. Unusual Perspectives.  You can challenge students to see things from unique perspectives by using AI to suggest alternative viewpoints or twists on familiar narratives.
5. Literary Trend Predictions.  You can explore AI’s predictions for future literary trends and use them as prompts to engage students in forward-thinking and speculative writing.
6. Character Dilemmas.  You can leverage AI to create complex moral and ethical dilemmas for characters, prompting students to explore the intricacies of decision-making in their writing.
7. Literary Remix Challenges.  You can experiment with AI to generate prompts that involve remixing or reimagining existing literary works, encouraging students to bring a fresh perspective to familiar stories.
8. Artwork Inspirations.  You can create artwork using an AI art-generator (like DALL-E) to give students images of characters, settings, conflicts, etc. to prompt their thinking and their writing.
9. Cultural Exploration.  You can use AI to explore cultural nuances and generate prompts that ask students to incorporate cultural diversity and awareness into their writing.
10. Cross-Curricular Integration.  You can explore opportunities for cross-curricular integration by using AI to generate prompts that connect with other subjects, creating interdisciplinary learning experiences.
11. Synthesize Historical Contexts.  You can employ AI to synthesize historical contexts and events, creating prompts that encourage students to explore and integrate historical elements into their writing.
12. Give Feedback.  You can also use AI chatbots to give students formative feedback on their writing, which itself is a prompt for writing (or rewriting).

Texting, typing, clicking, hyperlinking – students are communicating.  

It’s clear that our students don’t hesitate to brave new frontiers of communication, so we, too, should be just as fearless as educators.  

Just as we grew accustomed to Internet search, we need to grow accustomed to artificial intelligence and chatbots, learning how best to chat with them, even if it’s just to create a few prompts for writing, so we can do our best for our students and, in turn, make our jobs just a little easier and a little less stressful, and for educators, a little goes a long way!