How To Use ChatGPT As The Ultimate Thesaurus

Welcome to The Pen Pivot!

At 9am (EST) every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, we show tech-savvy writers how to use AI and new tech to write better content, faster.

In today’s email:  

• AI Writing Tip Of The Day🖋️ - How to use ChatGPT as the ultimate thesaurus. A prompt to find the perfect word(s) for any given context.

• 3 x Productivity Tools 🛠️ - Upgrade your workflow with these nifty new toys

AI Writing Tip Of The Day 🖋️

How To Use ChatGPT As The Ultimate Thesaurus

What I’ve always hated about the traditional thesaurus is how difficult it is to find a word that’s both effective and context-appropriate.

The words may sound elaborate, but do they really convey what I’m trying to convey with my specific piece of writing?

(Those words are in red because ChatGPT helped me find them. More on this later).

The point is, I rarely feel as though I find the perfect word for my needs.

So, I came up with a ChatGPT prompt to scratch my own itch - something to help me break through whenever I’m lost for words.

I honestly feel that this prompt transforms ChatGPT into the best thesaurus I’ve ever used.

Try it out for yourself.

Copy and paste the prompt in the yellow box below into ChatGPT after filling in the details. You can make it as simple or as intricate as you’d like.

The prompt is simple but effective.

The trickiest part to get right, however, is arguably the most important.

As you’d expect, the “desired meaning” will make a huge amount of difference.

What I’ve found works best here is simply telling ChatGPT what you’re trying to get out of your head and onto the screen.

You know that nagging frustration you feel when you just can’t find the right word?

Type that frustration within the brackets for “desired meaning”. It doesn’t need to be concise or well articulated. ChatGPT will decode what you’re trying to say.

If you wanted to get very intricate with this prompt, consider including the following input parameters as well:

Here’s an example of where I put this ChatGPT prompt to use. I used it to find a word for the red sentence earlier on in this newsletter.

Zoom in if you have to.

And here’s the response. While I stopped after three, you could keep asking ChatGPT for “more examples” and it will quite happily oblige.

3 Productivity Tools For Writers 🛠️

With a new productivity tool seemingly being released every few seconds, it can be pretty hard to keep track of it all.

Here are a few to check out:

1. Notion AI: A writing assistant that can help you with brainstorming, editing, summarizing, and more. With Notion already being an immensely powerful notes app, adding AI into the mix is pretty exciting (link).

2. Glasp: A Chrome extension that allows you to capture online content with colored highlighting. The highlighted content is then automatically curated on your Glasp homepage. It even allows you to highlight and annotate YouTube videos (a long-held dream of mine)! (link)

3. Perplexity AI: A search engine that provides real-time answers to questions by scanning the internet for information and citing sources for the answers it provides (link). Like Google, but more relevant to your specific question.

And that’s all for today!

Misya, The Pen Pivot