How to Write a Better Prompt

You don't need a rigid formula for every single prompt, but a mental checklist makes strong prompts start to feel automatic. Five things consistently separate the weak ones from the strong ones. The next four lessons go deeper on each, but here's the method in full.

1. Context — what's the situation, and what does the AI need to know that it can't otherwise guess?
2. Role — who should it "act as" while it answers? This shapes the vocabulary, the priorities, how deep it goes.
3. Objective — what should this actually accomplish, not just what topic it should touch on.
4. Tone — formal, casual, warm, direct? Say nothing, and you'll get a generic middle ground.
5. Output format — length, structure, shape: an email, a bulleted list, a table, a word count.

You won't need all five spelled out every time — for something quick and low-stakes, one or two is often plenty. But for anything that actually matters — a real email to a real customer, a document someone else is going to read — running through this list takes a few seconds and consistently gets you something closer to usable, instead of something you end up rewriting anyway.

One more habit worth picking up: treat the first response as a draft, not a verdict. If it's close but not quite there, say exactly what to change — "shorter," "less formal," "add a call to action" — rather than starting the whole thing over. AI is genuinely good at revising once you've told it what's wrong.