Document Reformatting Bot
Some time ago I was chatting with a group of teachers about two big problems that were–unbeknownst to them–related. ChatGPT was a sensitive topic and the general consensus was it’s an interesting tool but mostly (in their world) being used for evil. The students looking to get through their assignments in as little time as possible were obviously using it to finish their work for them, and it wasn’t going well.
As a result, the attitude towards the tool was that it’s mostly dumb. I found this interesting, because if there’s one group that should know the problem is typically the kids themselves, it should be teachers. The topic quickly shifted to a decision made by the local school board: all report card comments must be bullet points.
See, this was actually a big deal. The way report cards work is each student is receives about 1-3 paragraphs of comments about their progress or current situation. When you have hundreds of students, this amounts to a not-insignificant amount of drudgery. One popular solution to this problem? Creating your own bank of responses to draw from. You’ve got categories for “not doing well” all the way up to “doing spectacularly”. Some teachers will use a bank of pre-made comments as inspiration, while others will simply paste from it. Copy, copy, copy, paste, paste, paste… problem (kinda) solved.
So having them suddenly do all their comments in a totally different format is actually a bit of an ask, and it wasn’t going over well with the group. That is, of course, until I suggested the very tool they were demonizing 5 minutes prior would save them hours of tedious re-writing.
CREATING A FORMATTING BOT
Dealing with written content is among ChatGPT’s greatest strengths, so this one isn’t overly difficult. It doesn’t require a dedicated GPT to perform the task, but we’ll make one anyways just because it’s good practice and keeps the consistency where we want it. Also, we’ll turn the code interpreter on so that if the teacher happens to have their comment bank in a document, they can simply upload the document instead of having to copy and paste everything.
What we’ll need this GPT to do is quite straightforward: take paragraphs of text and break them up into manageable bullet points. We can expand upon this depending on how the source material is written. Perhaps it’s a wild mess of paragraphs with no real structure, or perhaps it’s grouped into sections already. Whichever it is, ChatGPT will be able to manage it if we guide it to do so.
For this example we’ll just make it work a bit harder and provide it several paragraphs that are all over the place and see if it can group things into manageable categories.
INSTRUCTIONS
Overall
Your task will be to take a series of paragraphs and format them into bullet points. While there’s no immediate or obvious structure to the paragraphs, I’ll need you to group the bullets under headings.
An example of this might be:
Before:
One area for improvement lies within developing a greater attention to detail. While the quality of their work is generally excellent, occasional minor errors can slip through. Implementing a careful review process before submitting work could be helpful in reducing these errors. Further training on software specifics could also help streamline their process and boost accuracy.
After:
Areas for Improvement
- Needs to develop greater attention to detail to minimize occasional errors.
- Could benefit from implementing a careful review process and further training on specific software to enhance accuracy.
- Encouraged to communicate proactively about potential obstacles to prevent escalation and facilitate early problem-solving.
TESTING OUR FORMATTING BOT
While the threat of hallucination does exist when using ChatGPT, tasks like this are generally quite safe. Not safe enough to not check its work, but you’re unlikely to find many problems, which was the case here. I took a pre-existing bank of comments in paragraph format and then had it convert them to categorized bullets.
While it took some liberty with the language, rarely did it ever change meaning. One thing I enjoyed was that it didn’t simply take sentences and make them list items. It broke them down into the type that you’d be more likely to see in a bullet point. For example, “One area for improvement lies within developing a greater attention to detail“ became: “Needs to develop greater attention to detail to minimize occasional errors.”
ALTERNATE USES
This GPT focuses on transforming text for educational administrative tasks, specifically reformatting detailed paragraphs into concise bullet points for report cards. This skill can also be leveraged for various content organization and summarization applications to create GPTs that could act as:
Meeting Notes Summarizer
This GPT could take detailed minutes from meetings and condense them into key points and action items. It would organize the content under relevant headings, making it easier for attendees to review the outcomes and follow up on tasks.
Email Management Assistant
Professionals who might find themselves on the more verbose side of things could use this GPT to summarize their content into bullet points, highlighting the main messages, questions, or action items, thus improving productivity and response time.
User Manual Simplifier
Companies (or consumers) could use this GPT to transform complex user manuals into simplified, bullet-pointed quick-start guides, making it easier for customers to understand and use the products effectively.
