Why prompts matter
Your First Deliberately Specific Prompt
Reading about prompts is easy. Writing one and feeling the difference is the part that sticks. This lesson is a 5-minute exercise. Open your favourite chat tool — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, anything — and do exactly this.
The exercise
Pick one of these tasks. Don't overthink it.
- A short message asking a colleague to swap a meeting time.
- A LinkedIn comment thanking someone for a recommendation.
- A two-line bio for a community Discord.
Now write two prompts for the same task.
Prompt A — vague (one sentence, no constraints)
Examples:
Write a message asking my colleague to swap our meeting.
Thank Ahmed for his recommendation on LinkedIn.
Prompt B — specific (six things named)
Use this checklist. Every prompt B you write must name every item in this list:
| # | Slot | Example for the meeting message |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Who you are writing to | "my colleague Mona" |
| 2 | The single goal | "swap our 11:00 Tuesday meeting to Wednesday afternoon" |
| 3 | Tone | "casual but professional" |
| 4 | Length | "under 40 words" |
| 5 | One piece of context | "she's been on holiday — don't sound annoyed" |
| 6 | Output format | "just the message body, no greeting line" |
A real prompt B might look like:
Write a message to my colleague Mona asking to swap our 11:00 Tuesday
meeting to Wednesday afternoon. Tone: casual but professional. Under 40 words.
She just got back from holiday — don't sound annoyed. Output only the
message body, no greeting line.
What to notice
After you run both, look at the two outputs side by side. Three things almost always happen:
- Prompt A's answer is longer than you needed. The model padded the silence.
- Prompt A's tone is wrong — too formal, too generic, or weirdly cheerful.
- Prompt B is shippable as-is, or with one tiny edit.
Prompt A vs Prompt B — same task, two outcomes
Prompt A — vague
- Too long for what you need
- Wrong tone, often too formal
- Needs a second pass
Prompt B — specific
- Shippable as-is or with a tiny edit
- Tone matches the recipient
- Length is what you actually want
That's the whole shift. You didn't get smarter, the model didn't change, you just stopped letting the model guess. Every single trick in this course is a more refined version of this same move: take something the model was guessing about and write it down explicitly.
A small habit to build
For the rest of this week, every time you start a prompt, take 10 seconds and answer all six questions in your head before you type. You'll feel slower for two days. Then it'll be automatic, and your hit rate will jump.
Next module: we promote those six questions into a permanent prompt skeleton — the five-slot anatomy. :::
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