This is Lesson #13 of the ANTIghostwriter course — a free, complete system for creating authentic content with AI assistance.
New here? Start from the full course overview.
Previous lesson: #12: Set Up Free Local Transcription with OpenAI Whisper
What You’ll Learn
Raw transcripts are messy — no paragraphs, unclear punctuation, repeated words. In this lesson, you’ll use AI to transform them into clean, organized notes ready for article writing. I’ll share my formatting prompt that preserves your original voice while fixing errors and adding structure. You’ll also learn why Grok often works better than ChatGPT for this specific task.
Time to complete: ~15 minutes per batch of notes
Working with Transcribed Content
At this stage, you have collected your raw material: thoughts exported in text format. Whether you typed directly into text files or transcribed audio notes, the important thing is that you now have a collection of these files.
In this step, we’ll focus on formatting these notes properly.
The process requires uploading your text files to an AI assistant.
For this purpose, I personally use Grok to save money instead of ChatGPT. While you can certainly use ChatGPT, I’ve found that Grok delivers better results in this specific context, as ChatGPT tends to hallucinate more frequently and sometimes changes phrases unnecessarily. Grok seems to work better with shorter prompts. These are my current observations, though models are constantly evolving, so this information might already be outdated.
I’m confident that with a carefully crafted longer prompt, you could train ChatGPT to perform equally well, but I find that Grok with a simple prompt instructing it not to paraphrase but only fix errors works effectively.
Prompt for Formatting Notes
In this chat, I will send text that was transcribed from audio
notes. Your task is to prepare a clean, error-free transcript
formatted for plain-text copying.
Do not paraphrase or reword the content — only correct words that
are clearly misplaced due to incorrect speech recognition.
Format the text for clarity and structure: use paragraph breaks,
numbering, or bullet points where applicable.
The names of the text files with transcripts include the date and
time of the note — arrange the final transcript in chronological
order accordingly.
Do not change the original thoughts — only fix obvious
transcription errors.The Formatting Process
After uploading your text files to the AI assistant, it will produce a properly formatted version. The raw transcripts typically come as flat text without paragraph breaks, but AI can divide the content into paragraphs, add structure, create headings, and apply appropriate formatting. I prefer dividing the text into paragraphs (short semantic blocks), adding proper punctuation, correcting errors, removing duplicates, and fixing incorrectly recognized words.
The result is a well-formatted text divided into paragraphs, ready for use. I call this the “source” — the foundation upon which the next stages will be built.
In the same chat session, you can continue uploading new notes that you create while developing your ideas. The AI will simply continue formatting them accordingly.
