Decode your reader with generative AI

- Imagine you're on a first date. Your date talks about themselves constantly, their interests, their passions, their pursuits. They don't even try to learn what you like. A better date might look like this. The date asks you a few questions to find out what you're interested in, and then uses your responses to talk about things you care about or even better things you both care about. This is a good analogy for thinking about the person or people who will read your document. We need to speak to our reader's interests and needs, not just our own. Why? Because our reader is the one who decides whether to read the document or not and what they actually want to do with the information. So just like on a date when we're writing , we need to figure out who our reader is and what they care about in order to meet our own objectives. That's what we mean by decoding. We're studying our reader and capturing their overt or covert interests and translating them into points we'll address in our document. So how can AI help? Lucas is driving the chat bot today, and now he's going to ask ChatGPT to identify some of our readers' interests, motives, and goals. - [Lucas] For the next few videos, we will follow the example of a financial analyst at a real estate firm who needs to create a quarter one earnings report to demonstrate the potential of ChatGPT to amplify our writing. We'll start with this prompt here, which is aimed at creating an output customized to better understanding who will be reading this and what they really care about. We'll start by saying, I'm trying to understand my readers better. This is my desire or my goal. Next, I'll provide context and say, my readers are a group of executives who are going to read my quarter one report on earnings in progress towards our goals of lowering costs and improving net revenue. Again, the more context, the better. So we'll say I'm a financial analyst at a real estate company. Finally, our output goal. Please create a list of five concepts that my readers are interested in or care about. The first one here, financial performance metrics. That seems very in line with what our readers would care about. Other ones include revenue diversification efforts and strategic initiatives in progress. These are excellent and will really help guide me in the future. However, I want to make sure I hit on that first point even harder, even if I'm more interested in a different subpoint. It's about my reader and they want to know about the financials. Now, you may just think I can copy and paste this, but remember our write it well process. Step two is to identify our reader's concerns. So let's do that with another prompt. We'll state, please provide me five more subpoints about the executive's financial concerns. This is going to help us get a more comprehensive list so that we can really understand our reader. As you can see now, we have a clear list of ideas like cashflow management and return on investment that we are reminded to cover. Asking ChatGPT to create a more comprehensive list of exactly what it is we should cover for each subpoint in this report is a really powerful way to plan your writing. You get a clear list of what your reader is interested in and know exactly what to write about. Keep this list of our reader's questions in mind. We'll see it again.