How to Write an Essay Like a Pro This Semester

If you want to write good essays that make your writing skills the envy of all your academic colleagues, you will want to leverage the many AI tools at your disposal to make every sentence sing and make every point clear, powerful, and persuasive.

The proper use of AI tools requires writers to get down and dirty with their chatbot, asking it about every detail so the writing you collaborate on is always optimal.

We’ve covered the in’s-and-outs of academic essay writing tips in the past with a step-by-step guide to essay writing and high school and college essay comparisons, but here, I’m going to show you how to write a professional essay today in 2025 and that involves using AI to make you the best writer you can be.

Table of Contents

• Brainstorming

• The Basics

• Thesis and Hook

• Persuasive Arguments and Counterarguments

• Conclusion

• FAQ

Brainstorming

When your essay is assigned, whether you have a few ideas floating around in your head or don’t have a clue where to begin, using AI can be helpful to ideate topics you may not have considered. AI is not a tool to replace human creativity, but to aid it with a quick, vast encyclopedia of information at your disposal.

ChatGPT, or more human AI engines, are powerful tools to use for any college essay or creative writing. Here’s what a brainstorming session with ChatGPT looks like after giving it a sample essay question:

AI will do more than provide you with different ideas for you essay, it'll give you tips on how to write each topic most effectively.

The Basics

Beyond making a compelling argument, there are basic elements that your writing will need to have no matter what your topic is. AI can help you perfect each of these basics until you gain the competency to shape your essays with the same perfect sheen.

Structure

Essay structure ought to follow a simple formula that is open to your own creative freedom to get your argument across. This formula includes an introduction that features a thesis statement, body paragraphs to outline and fortify your argument, and a conclusion to set the stakes of your argument in the real world.

Style

Everyone’s writing style is different, but readers want to feel your unique voice all the same. This doesn’t mean you need to include your background information into a research paper, but it does mean your writing style should feature some kind of background with your voice.

Whether you’re funny, detailed, or a contrarian, show it in your writing.

Conventions

Your essay's grammar, spelling, and punctuation should all be perfect if you want your essay to be pro. AI tools can take each of these conventions on with ease, whether it’s simply revising your writing or changing the sentence structure to enhance your writing, AI can do it all.

In 2025, it’s always a good idea to pass the first draft of your entire essay through an AI chatbot for proofreading to fix all the typos and grammatical errors.

Research and Citations

AI tools can aid you in both finding and formatting your citations, allowing you to ask your chatbot directly where you need to look to find the right citation for you.

In the case of certain AI engines with entire libraries of academic writing available to them, they can ouput legitimate citations for you to use along with the full bibliography.

Formatting your citations is an essential task if you want to get a good grade on your essay and being sloppy can land you plagiarism charges. You can learn the proper way to format bibliography yourself, whether MLA or APA style, however AI tools have automated this process so you can stay focused on the quality of your essay.

Thesis and Hook

If you want a pro essay, you will need a strong thesis and hook. A thesis is not your essay topic, it’s not your topic sentence, it’s not a description of subjective reality. Your thesis is the main argument you’re making and a good thesis is an arguable point.

People often confuse what makes a good thesis so, using AI tools to challenge your thesis is a good way to ensure the topic you’ve chosen is indeed strong enough to pursue. Here is what it looks like when you ask ChatGPT to challenge your thesis statement:

To truly showcase how academia is changing in favor of AI use, the University of Arizona has it's own thesis generator for students to use. In it, you can input your essay topic and it'll output a thesis, showing you the distinction between the two.

Your thesis is located at the end of your introductory paragraph, but along with the main argument of your work, you want a hook to be present in the introduction to grab your reader’s attention and bait them into reading further. A good hook leaves some information open to mystery, so readers can discover that information deeper into your essay.

You can copy and paste your entire introduction and ask AI to give you a few examples of how the paragraph can be improved. A good AI engine will respond with readable passages that employ different strategies to hook in readers from you to choose and learn from.

Persuasive Arguments and Counter-Arguments

Professional essays need to feature strong thesis statements. The argument you’re presenting in the thesis should be fleshed out by breaking down the mains point of your argument into the body of the essay. You can break any argument down into segments using AI by simply asking it to separate any given thesis into numerous points.

Once you finish breaking down each point of your thesis, instead of shying away from counter-arguments, you should finish your argument by bringing up each counter and dispelling them one by one. If you need help discovering counter arguments to yours, simply ask AI what are some potential counter arguments to your thesis.

Here is an example of AI offering a list of counter arguments to a thesis:

Each counter argument presented can then be input again for you to discover how to debate against it.

Conclusion

The only appropriate way of finishing up this article is by explaining how you write a strong conclusion to your essay. A good conclusion is more than just a simple summary of the points you’ve made. A good conclusion should answer two questions: “So what?” and “Now what?”

So what? Why does writing professional essays matter in college. With so many students using AI in their academic work, you need to learn the tools and the knowledge the tools hold. You want to know how to write effective essays and how to use AI to write effective essays with you.

Failure to embrace both writing skills and AI skill results in worser outcomes now than ever. With so much of ordinary and professional life hinging on AI competency, you will need to know how to use these tools to their full capabilities.

Now that you know what strategies you need to employ to improve your essays, you should learn to embrace AI tools in this endeavor while simultaneously learning these strategies for yourself. AI is more than a thesaurus or dictionary, it’s the ultimate writing assistant. A pair of fresh eyes that never go dry.

If you input your final draft to an AI chabtot, they will give you some form of analysis whether it's text that gives you constructive criticism or analytics like radability, grade level, and detectability.

Knowing how your writing will perform before submission, gives you a leg up against competition not employing these strategies.

Use AI to give you examples of topics, counter-arguments, or how to break down a thesis. Now that you’ve seen how these examples are automated, you can start thinking along the same lines yourself. AI doesn’t compromise your writing process, it completes it to reach your potential.

These are the keys to writing a great essay in 2025 and with these keys, you can hand in a final draft that everyone will be proud of.