Framing
Show rather than describe
You cannot describe the style or the format you want. “Be more concise” and “be more direct” get you nowhere.
How it goes
do it yourself- Stop describing. Go and find two past pieces of work that suited you, and paste them exactly as they are.
- Add a third that did not suit you, and say in one sentence what is wrong with it.
- Ask for the output, then ask what rule was inferred from your three examples.
The instruction, word for word
copy it, then correct itThis is how I write minutes. Two examples of what I want, one of what I do not. GOOD — "Decision: we keep the supplier until June. Why: switching would cost more than the overrun. To watch: the version 2 deadline, promised for 15 May." GOOD — "Decision: no hiring this quarter. Why: the workload drops from April, the team absorbs it. To watch: two announced departures in May." BAD — "Further to our meeting, it was agreed after discussion that the supplier question would be subject to further review." What is wrong: no decision, no owner, no date. Write up the minutes from my notes below, in the same shape. Then, separately, write the rule you inferred from my examples.
- The counter-example
- It does more than the two good ones together. It marks where the boundary is, whereas two good examples only give a direction.
- “What is wrong”
- One sentence, not a paragraph. Without it, the counter-example reads as a third model to imitate.
- The rule, asked separately
- This is the check. Until you have read it, you do not know what your examples actually communicated.
What you get out of it
The rule you get back is your real brief, the one you could not have written. It almost always contains a clause you never intended: that is where to add an example, never another instruction. This technique has a name, few-shot prompting, and the name misleads: nothing is learnt, your examples are re-read every time and forgotten straight after.
Going further
Two positive examples are nearly always enough. Past five, the output starts copying them instead of drawing a rule from them, and you get a pastiche of your own writing. Move them around too: the last one weighs more than the first, which is enough to skew a comparison between two attempts.