Concept

When crafting prompts, it’s crucial to balance brevity and context. A prompt should be concise enough to be clear and manageable, yet it must contain sufficient context to guide the respondents accurately. This balance ensures that the prompt is not overly vague, which could lead to misinterpretation, nor excessively detailed, which might limit creative or relevant responses. The key is to provide just enough information to set clear expectations without stifling the respondent’s ability to offer a nuanced or comprehensive answer.

It is important to consider chain-of-thought when writing prompts and working with AI. Chain-of-thought refers to the sequential flow of ideas or reasoning that leads from one concept or cognitive step to another, typically reflecting the process of thinking or problem-solving in a coherent manner.  In some aspects, AI works similar to how the human brain works.  You tend to get better results by breaking your prompts down so that there is a sequential flow to what your prompts are asking for.

Let’s take a look at an example of a series of prompts that incorporates chain-of-thought:

1. List 5 ideas for a blog article.
2. Create a catchy title for [idea topic].
3. Create an outline for a blog post on [idea topic].
4. Write the introduction for the blog post.
5. Write 500 words about [item1 of the outline].

Each prompt gets information for the next step while you have the opportunity to review the output of each step, making changes before you continue on to the next step.