Refine Articles in ChatGPT Using the LEVER Prompt: A ChatGPT Prompts Guide

Breaking through the noise on the internet and attracting qualified traffic to your website is tough. But research shows that 77% of websites that have active blogs see positive traffic trends due to blogging. This can lead to thousands of dollars in new revenue for Shopify merchants. 

Last week we asked our readers how often they’re creating blog content for their online stores. I have to say that I’m impressed that 43% of respondents said they blog weekly or more often!

If you’re in the weekly blogging cohort, KUDOS! I know how much work it takes to create strong content on a weekly cadence.

But it also means that over half of our readers aren’t able to prioritize content creation nearly that often. 57% of our the respondents blogging somewhere between never and less than weekly.

Whatever cohort you’re in, I bet you’d like to find ways to either save time when creating content for your blog or increase the quality of the articles AI is helping you write.

If you’re just getting started learning how to use ChatGPT as a powerful tool to write great content quickly you’ll find some of our recent articles on the topic helpful. We’ve recently written about how to use AI to help you ideate and research topics and how to use the RICCE framework to create powerful articles from scratch.

In today’s article we’re going to take it a step further with the LEVER technique.

Once you have a first draft of your article, you can use LEVER to get ChatGPT to reflect on, critique, and refine it’s own work. Using this AI prompt helps you create content that is even more aligned with your vision and needs.

Keep reading to learn more about LEVER and to find practical examples of how it can transform your articles for the better.

What Is the LEVER Technique for ChatGPT?

LEVER is a technique for fine-tuning the written content you get back from ChatGPT or other AI. It involves asking ChatGPT to reflect on different aspects of the content and rate it based on a scale that you create. After it rates it’s work, you can ask it to make adjustments.

For example, let’s say you use the RICCE prompt to write an article for you. Your next step can be to apply LEVER by asking it to rate the article’s formality on a scale from one (being the least formal) to 10 (being the most).

ChatGPT will review the content it just created and give you a rating from one to 10. Then, you can ask it to change the content so that it’s more aligned with the level of formality you prefer. For example, you might say, change this content from a seven on the formality scale to a three.

This process results in more finely-tuned, accurate content than just asking ChatGPT to make the article less formal. You’ll see how it works as you go through the samples in the next section.

LEVER in Action

The nice thing about LEVER is that you can use it to adjust ChatGPT content in whatever way you need. Whether you want more practical content or something more creative, LEVER is a tool that can help you create the perfect piece of writing for your blog through ChatGPT. 

Below, you'll find three ways to use LEVER to achieve your writing goals.

Changing Tone With LEVER

Suppose you run an online store that sells fitness products. You might want to use ChatGPT to start a blog post about the health benefits of walking. Using the RICCE technique you learned a week ago, here’s the first draft of the article you get back from ChatGPT.

It’s not too bad. But maybe it doesn’t fit your brand tone. You might want something more informal to appeal to a younger audience. 

Here’s how to use LEVER to do that:

Now, watch what happens if you tell ChatGPT to change the original content from a seven on the formality scale to a three:

You can see the language is much more conversational now. But if it’s still not what you want, you can ask ChatGPT to update the tone to another number on the formality scale, like four or five.

LEVER for Improved Creativity

Tone is just one way you can use LEVER to fine-tune your ChatGPT results. You might also want to stand out with more creative blog posts.

You can use LEVER to make these changes, too. All that you have to do is adjust the scale that you ask ChatGPT to grade itself with. Instead of a one to 10 range measuring formality, try a one to 10 range measuring creativity.

To see it in action, let’s return to the original article we got about the benefits of walking and ask ChatGPT to make it more creative:

In this simple example of the LEVER prompt we adjusted formality of the writing style, and creativity.

But you can use this prompt to make adjustments to any dimensionality of the writing. For example you could ask ChatGPT to assess the playfulness, humor, technical detail, clarity, even things like paragraph or sentence length.

Really your imagination is the only limitation.

Summarizing Other Resources With LEVER

LEVER can also be used as a technique to have ChatGPT summarize existing content for you. This can also be helpful when writing blogs for your site.

For example, let’s say while writing your article about the health benefits of walking, you want to cite recent research to support your claims. But maybe the studies you find are long and complicated so you want to get a summary to help you understand it more quickly.

You could copy and paste the studies into ChatGPT, asking it to summarize them for you. If the summary you get back doesn’t meet your needs, you can use LEVER to refine it until it does. For example maybe you want to decrease the level of technical detail so you would start by asking ChatGPT to rate it’s summary on this scale.

Rate the level of technical detail of the summary on a cale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest). 

Then you could ask for a lower number on that scale depending on the amount of detail you need to use the study in your blog.

Using LEVER To Generate Value for Your Readers

The examples in this article highlight how LEVER can help you write better content for your website. You can these posts to get more people to your site, generating more potential buyers.

But blogs are just one kind of writing you can optimize with LEVER. You can also use this strategy to write better marketing emails, improved website copy, or even product descriptions.