Goal: what do you want?
Weak prompts ask for vague help. Excellent prompts describe the exact outcome: draft the email, compare the options, explain the concept, improve the proposal, or create the plan.
Great prompts are not magic phrases. They are clear briefs. Use this checklist to understand the ingredients that help AI produce useful, accurate, reusable work.
Weak prompts ask for vague help. Excellent prompts describe the exact outcome: draft the email, compare the options, explain the concept, improve the proposal, or create the plan.
Context tells AI what situation it is working inside. Include the audience, background, source material, important facts, and why the answer matters.
Ask for a table, checklist, polished draft, step-by-step plan, comparison, or set of alternatives. Format is not decoration. It decides how easy the answer is to use.
Tone tells AI how the answer should feel to the reader: clear, warm, professional, friendly, concise, critical, reassuring, or plain-spoken.
Constraints stop the answer drifting. Add limits around length, style, facts, language, assumptions, sources, things to avoid, and any rules the result must respect.
Save your best prompts in a personal prompt archive. When a prompt works, label it by task, improve it after each use, and reuse it whenever similar work appears again.
Act as [role].
Goal:
[what you want AI to do]
Context:
[why it matters, who it is for, facts, notes, draft, source material]
Format:
[table, checklist, email, plan, comparison, draft, sections, length]
Tone:
[clear, warm, professional, friendly, critical, concise]
Constraints:
[limits, style rules, what to avoid, assumptions, no invented facts]