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How to Write Your First Essay With AI: From Topic to Structure | Learn Now
Author:
Dallas Hardwick
10 min
Aug 25, 2025
Table of contents
How to Use AI to Write an Essay: A Comprehensive Guide With Actionable Tips
Artificial intelligence, or simply AI, is now everywhere. It revolutionizes nearly all sectors from marketing and finance to medicine and beyond. No surprise, it has also made its way into students’ lives.
Students, who have always struggled with tedious essay writing and meeting academic standards, quickly found an effective application of the AI technology. Thanks to its generative capabilities, learners turned AI tools into powerful solutions for writing essays and other academic papers.
But can AI really help you with essay writing? And how do you use it correctly? In this article, you’ll find all the answers along with a step by step guide on how to streamline the essay writing process with AI.
🔍 Introduction
Before we get to the main point and tell you how to use AI to write an essay, let’s cover some basics first. So, what is AI essay writing anyway? This concept refers not to the entire AI technology, but rather to its specific subset. We’re talking about generative AI - a model designed to understand a user’s prompt and generate content based on it. Respectively, AI essay writing means just that - creating content using AI. A good example of this is ChatGPT. This tool can generate a human-like academic essay or any other piece of content using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) principles.
So, when you use AI tools, it’s like delegating your essays to an AI essay writer. The benefits seem to be huge. First and foremost, AI makes the essay writing process incredibly fast and simple. Compared to the most skilled human writers, AI writing tools work faster, giving you a detailed essay outline or a full essay in seconds. Another benefit is the versatility of such tools. With AI, you can simplify nearly any stage of the writing process, including:
- Essay topic generation
- Research and collection of supporting evidence
- Data analysis
- Outlining
- Drafting
- Editing and improvement
Okay, but where is the catch? Yes, using AI for essay writing seems to be fast, convenient, and rather effective. Still, there are many academic and ethical concerns about it. Though AI essay writing is fast, it’s important to remember that a machine always lacks critical thinking, creativity, and personal experiences needed to produce high-quality work. Moreover, a lack of critical thinking skills often makes a machine misinterpret facts or even feature inaccurate information in your essays. Also, a machine may lack a clear understanding of a particular subject, which can hold it back from coming up with an effective and creative solution.
And it definitely lacks its own thoughts and own voice, which are the two components that make good essays stand out from the pack. As you can see, the risks of using artificial intelligence for writing essays are quite big. But does this mean that you can’t use it in the writing process at all?
🧠 Can AI Write an Essay for You?
Can AI write my paper? This is one of the big questions facing students. So, here comes the answer - the capabilities of artificial intelligence are now huge. And this technology keeps evolving. Given this, we can say that yes, AI can aid the writing process and even produce quality results. A study that evaluated the quality of AI feedback on student essays revealed that AI can show deep, nearly human understanding of the given input and produce high-quality feedback. This means that it can potentially handle writing essays. But there are certain limitations.
Apart from a lack of critical thinking and creativity, as well as potential issues with academic integrity, there is also a catch in how you use AI for essay writing. There is a common misconception that it’s enough to say “Hey, AI write essay for me” to get a well written paper. But that’s not quite true. Creating a quality essay with generative AI requires more profound and detailed prompts. Otherwise, you risk losing quality. It’s important to provide sufficient background information to AI so that it understands your needs and delivers the best result. And that’s what our ultimate guide is all about.
So, can AI write an essay? The short answer is “yes.” AI can indeed help you generate ideas, make an essay outline, and find supporting evidence. It can also help you with actual writing. Still, it’s important to remember that AI lacks many traits inherent in human writers. It may not be able to assess your essay topic critically, double-check facts, or recreate an authentic writing style. This means that AI generated content always needs a human touch, especially if you are aiming for academic integrity. As CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, stated: “The future of AI is not about replacing humans, it’s about augmenting human capabilities.” And this is something you should keep in mind.
✍️ How to Use AI to Write an Essay
Now that you know about all the benefits and stumbling blocks of AI essay writing, let’s get to the main point. Here’s how to get AI to write an essay step by step:
- Don’t rush into writing. When it comes to using AI to write essays, the best approach is to start gradually. Ideally, begin with a simple brainstorming session. Tell AI about the kind of content you are working on, let’s say an argumentative essay or research paper, and specify your subject. Then ask AI to generate topic or heading ideas (if necessary) and request an essay outline. Making an essay outline helps you ensure a logical flow in your essay and instantly get some research findings based on the key points AI includes in the outline.
2.When you have an essay outline, first check how well it aligns with your needs and define if it has a logical structure and focuses on the right points. If everything looks good, move on to writing.
Here’s how to write an essay using AI: 1) ask AI to generate a complete draft based on your essay outline, or 2) request different sections separately. Both tactics can work. However, handling essay writing step by step can give you more control. In this case, you can specify word count, key points, and other specs for every part of your essay. You can even indicate your vision of a perfect thesis statement or clarify the main arguments for body paragraphs, thus personalizing your work.
3.Assess and refine. Once you are done with the writing part, delve into detail. Go through each part of your essay and ask yourself questions like: Do I have a strong introduction? Does the whole paper have a logical flow? Do body paragraphs look persuasive?
When you find areas for improvement in your argumentative essay, research paper, or another work, provide new prompts to refine the draft. Also, don’t hesitate to mention the findings from your own research, independent thoughts, or even personal anecdotes or experiences that you think should be added, and ask generative AI to insert them.
🛠️ Best AI Tools for Essay Writing
AI-powered essay writing can be fast and beneficial. To ensure this, you need to know how to shape your prompts, which details to specify (such as word count, topic, specific time period you’re exploring in your work, etc.), and how to turn a generated essay into your own work. And you have a detailed guide for this now. Another important point still worth consideration is how to pick the best AI essay writer for you.
There are many options to consider. And it’s easy to make the wrong choice. We suggest you focus on the following key factors when selecting a suitable AI essay generator:
- Accuracy and clarity of writing
- Diversity of outputs
- Simple customization of different essay parts, writing style, or format
- Support for academic writing
- Originality
- Privacy
If you are looking for an AI paper writer that has it all, WriterEssay is among the top picks among students. Though it may not be as well-known as ChatGPT, WriterEssay has one unique highlight - it was designed specifically for academic purposes. The tool easily handles narrative, analytical, reflective, and persuasive essays.
When using it, you can indicate the type of essay, number of pages, and even your academic level, and receive a tailored output. Though persuasive essays generated with this tool may also need a bit of work, it’s important that WriterEssay aims for academic integrity and high quality in every paper.
The best part? WriterEssay is a 2-in-1 service where you can generate persuasive essays with AI and request professional essay writing help from human writers in one place.
📄 Examples of AI-Generated Essays
To test the tool’s work and give you a real example of what it looks like when you generate essay AI, we’ve tested the WriterEssay tool. We requested the tool to create a 1-page persuasive essay for college level on the topic “Should college athletes be paid for their performance?”.
In this AI generated essay example, we can see a fairly coherent essay with proper structure, a clear thesis, and strong arguments. Furthermore, the tool lets you generate a second version of your draft and polish an essay to your preferences.
🕵️ Can AI-Generated Essays Be Detected?
At the end of our guide, we’ll briefly review another important point: Is writing essays with AI safe in terms of plagiarism?
The first thing we should indicate is that a machine still can’t provide a fully unique insight into the topic. It can evaluate the available resources and operate on facts. That is, there is never a complete guarantee of originality. Furthermore, specialized AI detection tools like Turnitin and ZeroGPT can find and flag AI-written content, which may put your reputation at risk.
So, can AI be detected in essays? Shortly, “yes,” it’s possible. Luckily, there are a few tricks that can help you humanize AI generated work:
- Rework the most critical parts of your essay, such as a thesis statement, heading, etc.
- Integrate your personal thoughts and experiences.
- Vary sentence length and structure.
- Rewrite complex sentences in your own words.
- Carefully proofread everything, including the introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion, to confirm logic and coherence.
- Improve clarity where necessary.
- Consider eliminating unnecessary words.
- Double-check all facts to ensure there is no bias or made-up arguments.
✅ Conclusion
So, can you really use AI for writing papers? The answer is “yes.” AI now has a wealth of capabilities to make writing an essay simple and worry-free. It can aid you in brainstorming and research, prepare an outline, help formulate a thesis statement, shape coherent arguments, and even generate a complete essay based on your prompt. But it does have certain limitations.
AI still cannot replace a human writer completely. It lacks the research skills, critical thinking, individual experience, and creativity needed to make your essay stand out. It also needs very detailed and customized prompts to give you what you are looking for. Luckily, the AI essay writing tips we shared with you here can help.
So, don’t miss a chance to leverage tools like WriterEssay to streamline your writing and handle any essay faster and easier. But don’t forget to use these tools ethically and add a personal touch to make every piece of writing truly yours.
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