Heads up: some links below are referral links. They cost you nothing extra and never change what we recommend. How this site makes money.
There is a large industry selling prompt packs, and almost all of it is unnecessary. Modern assistants do not need magic phrases. They need to know what you actually want, which most people never say.
The magic words myth
You have seen the advice: start with "You are a world-class expert copywriter with 20 years of experience." This did something on older, weaker models. On current ones it mostly wastes a line.
What still works is specificity. Not incantations — information.
The five principles
1. Name the reader
The single highest-leverage word count you will ever spend. "Explain APIs" and "explain APIs to a marketing manager who needs to brief a developer" produce entirely different answers. The audience determines vocabulary, depth, length and examples in one move.
2. Give it the real material
Do not describe your document — paste it. Do not describe the error — paste it. Do not describe your writing style — paste three paragraphs of it.
Every assistant is dramatically better at working with what is in front of it than at imagining what you might have meant.
3. Say what the output should look like
"A 200-word email, no bullet points, warm but not chatty, ending with a specific question" gets you something you can send. "Write an email about this" gets you a shape you then have to argue with.
Length, format, tone, and how it should end. Four details, thirty seconds.
4. Show an example when the format matters
If you want output in a particular shape, show one instance of that shape. This is by far the most reliable technique in prompting and the most underused. One example beats three paragraphs of description.
5. Ask for the plan before the work
On anything substantial — a long document, a piece of code, a strategy — ask for an outline first. Correcting a ten-line outline takes seconds. Correcting a finished draft takes a rewrite.
Before and after
Before: "Write a blog post about remote work."
After: "Write a 700-word blog post for managers who are sceptical about remote work and have been told to allow it. Acknowledge their real concerns rather than dismissing them. Practical, slightly dry tone. No bullet-point lists. End with one specific thing they can try this month."
Before: "Fix my code." [pastes 200 lines]
After: "This function should return sorted user records but returns them unsorted when the list has more than 50 items. Here is the function, and here is the calling code. What is happening?"
Before: "Summarise this report."
After: "Summarise this report in five bullets for a finance director who will read it in under a minute and needs to know whether to approve the budget. Lead with the recommendation."
The pattern in every case: who is reading, what they need it for, what shape the answer should take.
When it gets it wrong
Do not start over. Say what is wrong.
- "Too formal — write it like an email to a colleague you like."
- "The second section is wrong. We launched in March, not June. Fix that and leave the rest."
- "Good structure, weak examples. Same outline, better examples."
- "Cut it to half the length without losing the third point."
Assistants keep the thread of a conversation. Iterating is faster than restarting, and it is how experienced users work.
One more, genuinely useful: when you want honest feedback, ask "what is wrong with this?" rather than "what do you think of this?". The second invites praise. The first invites the answer you needed.
Try these on a real task
Take something you were going to do anyway and run it through the five principles. The difference from the first prompt to the fifth is larger than the difference between the tools.