I Gave My 256 Stories to ChatGPT for Analysis. It Said My Writing Was Shitty…

But it also gave me actionable insights about how to write better and where to improve.

Image Created by Author using Midjourney

That’s it! 

I’m done!

This weekend I decided to bring it to the next level.

I’ve had enough manual work.

It’s time to automate. 

So I uploaded all my stories to ChatGPT-4o along with an Excel file with their performance:

• reads

• views

• earnings 

• reading time

I asked ChatGPT to read every story and look up its title in the Excel file to see how it performed. 

And then the party started!

The analysis 

First, I asked ChatGPT to select my 20 top-performing stories and compare them to my 20 low-performers. 

Then I asked to prepare a comparative analysis and present it in a table format so that I can easily digest it. (I’m an Excel freak 😁)

The outcome

I got this result:

screenshot by author

Frankly, I was shocked! 

Did ChatGPT just say my writing was shitty?!

Almost 😁

But it also brought a lot of clarity about how and where to improve. And examples! And improved examples, i.e. it suggested how to edit my shitty writing to polish it. 

Now I know why some of my stories fly and some sink!

This is priceless!

Imagine how much time I would need to read all my 200+ stories, analyze and assess all these elements, and put them together with such a level of accuracy and simplicity!

I got this for seconds!! 

This is why I love technology! 

This is why I invest so much time and effort to train my brain to think technically (not only creatively) so that I can “speak” the language of machines and make my life easier, improve my work, and learn faster.

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A walk through the elements

Titles: I have to be as more specific as possible. Preferably add a number, although ChatGPT didn’t grasp that. It’s true I have vague titles in the past and I still do. 

Example: “How Overhyped AI is Ruining My Writing Big Time.” got this improvement suggestion from ChatGPT “The Dark Side of AI: How Overhyped Tools are Sabotaging My Writing Process and What You Can Do About It”. Not perfect but still something…It’s an area for improvement…

Intros: I can’t stress enough how importnat this is. I shared my approach many times — it’s storytelling. Here it is in a nutshell: the best storytelling formula I extracted from 100+ viral YouTube videos:

• You are in a SITUATION

• WHEN an unexpected event appears

• BUT you are helpless

• SO you do something to address it

• AND things TWIST way off

• ENDING

The magic is in the conjunctions. I call it the WHEN-BUT-SO-AND Framework.

Example:

• I’m walking down the street

• When it starts raining

• But I don’t have an umbrella

• So I call a cab

• And a pedicab arrives…

• At least I have a shelter

credit: Canva

Structure: That’s new to me. I knew it had to be skimmable, but here we talk about logic. True, some of my step-by-step guides went viral, that’s why ChatGPT took that as a reference. I see some narrative-driven stories get high engagement, but it’s not my style. My brain loves structure. I was a math fan in school, not so much into literature. I love to be me. 

Wording: Readability is a big thing when you write online. I strive for 6th grade or lower. I check my readability with the Hemingway app, it’s free. 

Sentence length: This is also about readability to me. ChatGPT proposed to stay short and simple, but I know some writers try to mix with long sentences to create a rhythm and keep the reader’s attention. Maybe I should also try that and do the analysis again. 

Storytelling: To me this is all about emotions — ups and downs wins and failures, unexpected twists, and all that. But ChatGPT added actionable insights. Interesting! True, I use this to add more value to my stories. But I wouldn’t add it in the storytelling part. 

Outros: CTAs are a must, here’s the place to link your newsletter. Even better: a freebie that collects emails. This is what I do. 

Content Differentiation (how the heck ChatGPT come out with this element 👀): Unique personal insights. I love that! I know some writers aim to provide unique angles on common topics. Like for example: fitness is bad because this and that. I’m not that kind of person, I’m hands-on, no fluff. But on one thing we agree: I need a unique perspective. Not boring! 

Formatting: the bullets, the bolds, the lists, and all that — it all makes it skimable. But I also see a lot of stories with big chinks of paragraphs with unformatted text getting huge engagement. Often those are the boost materials. Maybe I’ll never get boosted because of that 😉 Just not my thing. 

Engagement Techniques: I don’t know how this can contribute to better performance, but it definitely differentiates my best from my worst. So I’ll keep doing it. 

Story Length: I suspected that. Longer stories = better performance. But I also believe in the short form. And I can’t push myself to write longer just because. I have to have something to say. Sometimes I just want to say a few sentences and that’s it. I’m falling short here, but I guess I have to aim for a good balance in the future. 

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By the way, go ahead! Steal this summary if you’d like to. I’d love it if I helped. I also have them in my freebies on Gumroad, download here. 

But I’d recommend preparing the same analysis for yourself. This way you’ll get personalized insights, as those are valid for me and might not be valid for you. 

How to do that kind of analysis?

Anyone can easily do this.

In a nutshell, this is what I did:

• I downloaded all my stories from Medium as HTML files. This you can do from Profile -> Settings -> Security and apps -> Download your information. Select only your stories, and remove comments. Zip them all in one archive file.

• I copy pasted all my stories’ reads, views, and earnings into an Excel file. This you can do by loading Story stats, then scroll down until it loads every single piece of it, then mark the whole list by taking titles, reads, views and earnings, and then copy and paste in Excel or Google Sheet. Format it — delete all unnecessary information and structure it in a way that it presents one story on a signle row. Like this:

screenshot by author

• Upload the zip file and the Excel file (or a link to the Google sheet) to ChatGPT-4o.

• Start talking to the AI and have fun with your discoveries!

Bottom line

With or without ChatGPT, just be yourself. Write from your heart. Let it be. Shitty. Awesome. Who cares? The point is to be you. At the end of the day, you’ll only remember the feeling you had when you wrote this one masterpiece that went viral.

And when you have enough data, feed the little guy and see how to get better. 

Now I hope you can see the tremendous help ChatGPT can bring to our writers’ lives. Maybe it won’t write instead of you, but it can definitely give you actionable insights about how to write better and where to improve.

And this is just one of the many ways I plan to start using AI for my writing. 

By the way, let me know if you’d like to have a detailed step-by-step guide on how to do that along with the prompts. 

As always, I’ll share everything with you!

Thanks for reading!