I want to start with the awkward part.
If you ask ChatGPT to write your essay, it will. Five paragraphs, thesis up top, three body paragraphs, a tidy conclusion. You can paste it in, change a few words, and submit. Plenty of students do this. Some are getting caught and some aren't.
Fennie is built differently and the difference matters most when you're writing. Our essay tools are explicitly not a ghostwriter. They help you brainstorm angles. They critique your outline. They tell you which paragraph is weakest. They suggest cuts. They will not write the paper for you.
This isn't a marketing line. It's a deliberate design choice we made because we think the alternative is making students worse writers. This piece is about what that design choice looks like in practice — and how to actually use the tools.
The line
Here's the line, as concretely as I can draw it.
Fennie will: help you understand the prompt, brainstorm possible angles, develop a thesis, outline a structure, critique a paragraph you've written, suggest where evidence is missing, point out logical gaps, flag voice inconsistencies, propose stronger transitions, work through revision with you.
Fennie won't: write your thesis statement for you, generate body paragraphs, produce a full draft, write a conclusion you didn't structure, output anything that goes directly into your paper.
The simple test is: anything Fennie outputs should be a question, a critique, a structural suggestion, or a fragment too small and abstract to use as-is. If it produced a sentence you could paste into your paper unchanged, that would be us writing your paper.
Why we made this choice
A blunt observation: ChatGPT is making student writing worse, not better.
Professors I've talked to are seeing it. The pattern is consistent. A paper opens in the student's voice — they wrote the intro themselves, probably the night they got the prompt. Body paragraph one shifts. The vocabulary tightens. Sentence rhythm goes uniform. The argument gets vaguer in a specific way — lots of "this highlights" and "this underscores," not a lot of "the king's decision in act three." Then maybe a paragraph at the end snaps back to the student's voice when they got tired and wrote the last bit themselves.
Voice flips mid-paragraph. That's the giveaway. And graders are noticing.
The deeper problem isn't the cheating. It's that students who lean on ghostwriters never learn to write. The thing writing instruction is supposed to do — make you slower, more deliberate, more aware of your own thinking — gets shortcircuited. You don't develop the skill. You don't notice when an argument is weak. You can't tell when a paragraph isn't pulling its weight, because you didn't write it.
We made Fennie's writing tools tutor-shaped because we want students who use them to actually become better writers over a term. It's slower than asking ChatGPT to write the thing. It's also the point.
The full workflow
Here's what writing an essay with Fennie looks like, end to end. I'll walk through it generically, then do specific examples after.
Step 1: Understand the prompt
Paste the assignment prompt into a new essay project. Open chat. Ask it to walk through what the prompt is actually asking. Most prompts have at least one trap — a verb that students misread (analyze vs. evaluate vs. compare), a scope constraint people skip, a question hiding inside a question.
Chat won't write your interpretation. It'll ask you what you think the prompt is asking, then point out what you might be missing. By the end of step 1 you should be able to write down, in your own words, exactly what the essay needs to do.
Step 2: Brainstorm angles
This is where the system shines. Open the brainstorm tool and you get a back-and-forth. You're trying to find the angle — the specific argument or interpretation — your essay will defend.
Fennie will offer angles you might consider. It won't tell you which to pick. The output is more like a conversation: "Here are four ways students often approach this prompt. Which seems most interesting to you? Why?" Followed by genuine probing: if you pick angle two, what would you need to prove?
Most students don't take this step seriously. They glance at the prompt, write down the first idea, and grind out a paper. The papers that get A's almost always come from a real angle decision. Fennie is patient about this in a way most humans aren't.
Step 3: Build the outline
You have your angle. Now structure it.
Fennie's outline tool starts with your thesis (which you write — it'll critique it but won't write it) and works backward. What does each body section need to establish? What evidence will you bring? Where are the counterarguments?
You can ask Fennie to critique the outline. Common feedback: "Your section three claim doesn't follow from section two without an extra step. What's the bridge?" or "You've got two paragraphs making the same argument with different examples. Is that intentional?"
The outline is the highest-leverage step. Fixing structural problems here costs nothing. Fixing them after you've written 1,500 words costs a weekend.
Step 4: Draft
You write the draft. Fennie is mostly quiet here. You can ask chat for clarification on a source, ask for help thinking through a particular paragraph's logic, ask "is this evidence strong enough or do I need more," but the actual sentence-by-sentence writing is yours.
Some students try to get around this by asking chat to "give me a sentence I can paraphrase." We've trained against that pretty hard. The response will reframe — "Walk me through what you're trying to say, and I'll help you sharpen it." It's a friendly refusal. Then you'll write the sentence.
Step 5: Critique
You have a draft. Open the critique tool. It reads the whole thing and gives feedback in a few buckets:
Argument coherence — does the thesis actually get defended? Are the body sections delivering on what the thesis promised?
Evidence strength — where are claims under-supported? Where could a citation help?
Structural flow — are transitions working? Is the order right?
Voice and clarity — where is the language fuzzy? Where are sentences doing too much work?
Weakest paragraph — Fennie names one paragraph as the weakest and explains why. This is uncomfortably useful.
You don't get rewrites. You get a list of issues. The rewriting is yours.
Step 6: Revise
Work through the critique. Make the changes. Re-run critique on the revised version. Most papers benefit from at least two passes.
A specific tip: revise the weakest paragraph first. The critique is almost always right about which one it is, and fixing the worst paragraph often raises the whole essay's grade more than polishing the rest.
Three examples by class
The shape of the workflow stays the same; what changes is what each step looks like.
Law school case brief
Step 1 is unusual: the "prompt" is the case itself. Reading and identifying the issue is most of the work.
Step 2 isn't really angle-finding — case briefs follow a fixed structure (facts, issue, holding, reasoning, dissent). What you're brainstorming is which facts matter for the rule.
Step 3 is the IRAC outline, which Fennie will critique against the case's actual reasoning.
Step 4, the writing, is where most 1Ls struggle: stating the rule precisely without paraphrasing it into mush. Fennie won't write the rule statement, but it will tell you when your statement is too loose.
Step 5 critique flags whether your reasoning section actually maps to the court's reasoning, or whether you skipped a step.
AP English literary analysis
Step 1: figure out what kind of analysis the prompt wants. AP prompts often ask about a specific technique (imagery, narrative perspective, structure) and students who write about a different technique lose points even with strong writing.
Step 2: angle is everything. "Imagery in Beloved" is a topic. "Imagery of color in Beloved tracks Sethe's relationship to the past" is an angle. Fennie will spend real time helping you tighten this.
Step 3: outline checks whether your textual evidence actually supports the angle.
Step 5 critique is unusually useful for AP. The specific feedback about voice and clarity tends to map directly to the AP rubric.
MBA case study
Step 1: case studies have multiple decisions buried in them. Identify the specific decision the prompt is asking you to evaluate.
Step 2: business case angles are usually some version of "given these constraints, which option creates the most value, and over what time horizon." Fennie helps you sharpen which option you're defending and what tradeoffs you're acknowledging.
Step 3: outlines for cases include an explicit "what assumptions am I making" section, which Fennie will press you on.
Step 5 critique is good at finding hand-waved analysis. "You claim option B is more profitable but the numbers in the case suggest the margin difference is smaller than your argument depends on. Re-check?"
Honest limits
Some essays Fennie's tools can't substitute for real human feedback on.
Highly stylistic creative writing. We can flag voice inconsistencies, but workshop-style feedback on the texture of your prose — go to a human.
Discipline-specific conventions outside the major academic genres. A medical school personal statement, an art history visual analysis with very specific formal conventions — chat can help, but get a person who knows the genre to read the final.
Citation formatting at scale. We can flag when a citation looks off. We can't replace a thorough Bluebook check.
For most college and grad school writing, though, the loop above is enough.
A note on academic integrity
Different schools have different policies on AI tools, and they're changing fast. Here's our straight take.
Using Fennie to brainstorm, outline, get feedback, and revise is, by most reasonable definitions, the same kind of help students have always gotten from writing centers, tutors, friends, and TAs. We think that's fine.
Using Fennie to write your paper for you would be a problem. We've designed the tools so this is hard to do — chat won't generate paragraphs, critique won't produce rewrites, brainstorm gives you angles to consider not arguments to copy. But "hard to do" isn't "impossible," and if you're trying to game it, you can probably find ways.
If you do, your writing won't get better, your professor will probably notice, and the long-term cost to you is real. We can't enforce academic integrity for you. We can build tools that are pointing in the right direction, which we have.
If your school's policy is "no AI assistance whatsoever," even brainstorming is a violation, and you should respect that. Different game.
The honest thing about writing is that it's hard. Not because the words are hard — because the thinking is. A tutor who lets you offload the thinking is making you worse at it. A tutor who makes you do the thinking, and helps you see where it's weak, is making you better. We're trying to be the second kind.
Try the essay tools on your next paper. Start with Fennie free.