AI Guides › Prompting
Why Examples Beat Adjectives
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
Ask for something "punchy," "warm," "professional but not stiff," or
"concise but thorough" and you've described a feeling, not a target. Tone
words feel precise while you're typing them because you know exactly what you
mean by "punchy" — but the word itself carries none of that. Handed to
someone (or something) without your mental picture attached, it's a
Rorschach blot: five different readers produce five different "punchy"
outputs, and all five could defend the word choice.
The rule: show a sample of the tone you want instead of naming it — a
single example does more precise work than a paragraph of adjectives.
The mechanism
- Find or write two or three sentences in the voice you want, from
anywhere — something you wrote before, a piece you admire, even a made-up
sentence in the style you're after. It doesn't need to be about the same
topic.
- Hand it over as the reference, not the description. "Match this tone:
[example]" rather than "make it sound like X but more Y."
- If you must describe it too, describe it by contrast, not by
adjective. "Like the example, not like a press release" narrows things
further than another adjective would.
- For anything you'll reuse often, keep a short file of two or three
reference snippets — a warm one, a formal one, a terse one — so you're
never starting the search for an example from scratch.
Why this works better than it should
An adjective asks the reader to guess at a category. An example hands over
the actual thing — word length, sentence rhythm, how formal the vocabulary
is, whether it uses contractions, how it opens. All of that is visible in
three real sentences and invisible in the word "punchy." You're removing a
translation step, not adding detail.
What to skip
Skip hunting for the perfect reference example — an imperfect one that's
roughly in the right register still beats a precise-sounding adjective. And
skip pairing an example with five extra adjectives on top; if the example
does the work, the adjectives mostly just risk pulling against it.
Guardrails
- An example sets tone, not content — it won't stop factual errors, and it
can't substitute for stating an actual constraint like length or audience.
- Borrowed examples carry their source's quirks with them. If your reference
came from copyrighted material or someone else's distinctive voice, that's
worth being deliberate about, not just convenient.
- Tone matching from an example is still approximate. Read the output; don't
assume the match is exact because the source was.
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