The word "prompt" has attracted an unhelpful amount of mystique. There are courses promising secret formulas and long lists of magic phrases, and almost none of it survives contact with actual use. What survives is dull and short, so here it is.
A question that works usually contains four things. Most questions that fail are missing three of them.
One. Who you are
The system has no idea who is typing. Without that, it writes for the average reader of everything, and the average reader of everything is nobody.
A sentence is enough. "I am a retired teacher with no technical background." "I am a bookkeeper for four small firms." "I have been doing this for twenty years and I do not need the basics explained." That last one saves more time than any other single sentence, because the default assumption is a beginner and the default therefore wastes three paragraphs telling you what you already know.
Two. What the actual situation is
This is where the specifics go, and it is the part people compress hardest because it feels like waffle. It is not waffle. It is the only thing separating your question from the generic version of your question.
Numbers help. Constraints help most of all. "I have two hours a week, not two hours a day." "It has to work on a phone." "Three of the five people involved will not read anything longer than a page." Every constraint you supply removes an entire category of answer that would have been useless to you.
Three. What you want back, in what shape
Say the form. A list of six. Two paragraphs. A table with three columns. An email under a hundred and fifty words. A single recommendation with the reasoning underneath it.
Unspecified, you get the house style, which is roughly five hundred words of balanced prose with a summary at the end. Sometimes that is what you wanted. Usually it is not, and asking for the shape is a five word fix.
It is also worth naming what you do not want. "No introduction, start at point one." "Do not give me both sides, tell me which one you would pick." "Plain sentences, no bullet points."
Four. What good looks like
The strongest single move, and the most neglected. Show it an example.
If you want writing in a particular voice, paste two sentences of that voice. If you want a summary in a particular style, paste one you liked. If you want the rows of a table filled in, fill in the first row yourself.
This works better than describing the same thing in adjectives because the system is built to continue patterns. An example is a pattern. "Warm but professional" is three adjectives that could mean forty different things, and it will pick the average of the forty.
The same request, twice
Thin. "Write a letter to my landlord about the damp."
Complete. "I rent a two bedroom flat and have had damp in the back bedroom since November. I reported it by phone twice, in November and January, and nothing has happened. I want to be firm but not aggressive, because I intend to stay here. Write a letter under two hundred words that states the dates, says what I want done, and asks for a written reply within fourteen days. Plain sentences, no legal threats."
The second message matters more than the first
None of the above will make the first answer perfect, and treating it as a failure when it is not perfect is the real mistake. The first answer is a probe. It shows you what the system thought you meant, which is often the most useful information in the exchange.
Useful second messages are short and specific:
- "Half the length."
- "Too formal, write it the way you would say it out loud."
- "You have assumed I own the building. I rent."
- "Point four is the only interesting one. Give me five more like it and drop the rest."
- "That is the generic answer. What would you say if you had to be specific and risk being wrong?"
That last one is unreasonably effective. The default pull is toward the safe, hedged, everything depends on your circumstances answer, and naming the hedging usually dissolves it.
Three things that do not work as well as advertised
Politeness rituals. Please and thank you cost nothing and change almost nothing. Say them if you like saying them.
Urgency and stakes. Telling it that your job depends on the answer is folklore. Being specific about the standard you need is not the same thing and does work: "this is going to a client, so no filler."
Enormous stacked instructions. Past a certain length the later rules start getting quietly dropped. Four clear constraints beat fourteen. If you genuinely need fourteen, get the first draft with four and fix the rest in follow up messages.
Keep the ones that worked
Everything above compounds into one habit. When a question produces something genuinely good, save it somewhere. Not the answer, the question.
People who use these tools heavily are almost never writing from scratch. They are pasting in a version of something that worked before and changing two details. The whole apparent skill is a private file of about a dozen questions, built up over a couple of months, mostly by accident. There is no shortcut to it and there does not need to be, because a dozen is not many.