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The Beginner's Guide To Saying What You Actually Want
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
Ask a beginner what they want from a prompt and they'll describe the topic —
"something about the quarterly numbers," "help with the email to the
client." That's a subject, not an outcome, and a model given a subject will
guess at the outcome for you. Sometimes the guess is right. Often it's a
perfectly good answer to a slightly different question than the one you had
in mind.
The rule: describe the finished thing you want to be holding, not the
subject you want it to be about.
The mechanism
- Name the output, specifically. Not "help with the email" — "a three-
sentence email, polite but direct, asking for the deadline to move by a
week." A subject leaves the format, tone, and length all as guesses.
- Say who it's for. The same content written for a client, a colleague,
or your own notes is three different pieces of writing. This one detail
usually does more work than any other single addition.
- Say how long, roughly. "Two paragraphs" or "one page" removes an
entire axis of guessing. If you don't know yet, say that too — "keep it
short, I'll ask for more if I need it" is a legitimate instruction.
- Say what you don't want, when it's the more efficient thing to say.
"Not overly formal" is sometimes clearer and shorter than describing the
tone you do want.
- Check the result against the outcome you named, not against how
confident it sounds. If you asked for three sentences and got three
fluent paragraphs, that's a miss on the actual ask, however well written.
What to skip
Skip describing the topic in more and more detail as a substitute for naming
the outcome — extra background about the subject doesn't tell it what shape
you want the answer in. Skip assuming a single adjective like "professional"
or "good" is specific enough; those words mean different things to different
people, and to different tasks.
Guardrails
- This is about the input side. A well-specified prompt still needs its
output checked — clarity in the ask doesn't guarantee accuracy in the
answer.
- For genuinely exploratory tasks, where you don't yet know what you want,
naming a fuzzy outcome ("give me a few different angles on this, short")
is still more useful than naming none at all.
- If you keep needing three or four follow-ups to get a usable result on
similar tasks, that's worth writing down as a reusable prompt rather than
re-specifying it from scratch each time.
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