You will be able to add constraints and format instructions that make the output ready to use with little editing.
Priya's context paragraph from lesson 1.2 worked. The assistant understood who the drivers were and why they might doubt the change. But the draft ran to 320 words, opened with "Dear valued colleagues", explained what an outpatient claim is, and ended with "Warm regards, HR Team" on a message bound for a WhatsApp group. None of it was wrong, yet she still had to cut half before she could send it.
Context tells the model what situation it is writing for. Constraints and format tell it what the finished thing should look like. Without them, the model makes its own choices, and its choices are the average of everything it has seen. This lesson covers the four instructions that close that gap.
"Keep it short" means something different to everyone. To a model it might mean 200 words instead of 400. Give it a limit it can actually work to: under 150 words, five bullet points, three sentences, one page, a subject line of no more than eight words.
Models are better at counting items than counting words, so "five bullet points" will usually be followed more closely than "120 words". Treat a word limit as a target, not a guarantee, and check it if it matters. For Priya, "under 80 words, because it will be read on a phone" did the job, and the reason helped too. A model that knows why the limit exists makes better choices about what to cut.
Adjectives on their own give the model very little. "Professional but friendly" covers everything from a bank's terms and conditions to a cheerful sales email. A reference point works better, because it names a situation the model has seen many examples of.
Compare these. "Write in a friendly tone." "Write it the way a supervisor who knows the drivers by name would post in the group chat." The second carries a whole set of choices: short sentences, no corporate phrases, direct instructions, some warmth without fuss. Other reference points that work well: how you would write to a senior client you have known for years, how a GP explains a result to a worried patient, how you would brief your own manager in a corridor.
If you know what shape you need, say so: a table with columns for plan, monthly price, data and contract length, say, or a subject line over three short paragraphs, or numbered steps a new staff member could follow without asking anyone.
The more precisely you name the structure, the less reformatting you do afterwards. Work back from where the output is going. Something headed for a spreadsheet should arrive as a table, while an email draft is easier to paste when the subject line and body come separately, and a slide wants a heading with no more than four short points under it.
Priya asked for "one message I can paste straight into WhatsApp, with the date in the first line and the HR counter hours as the last line". That instruction alone moved the most important fact to the top.
Models fill gaps by default. Leave out "no sign-off" and one may appear anyway. A draft about a price change, given no instruction against guessing, may invent a percentage, and a message to drivers can end up talking about a "digital claims workflow" when nobody asked it to avoid jargon.
Name what you do not want, then. These four earn their place in a lot of requests:
Do not guess figures, dates or names that are not in my message; use a placeholder in square brackets instead. No greeting or sign-off, because it is going into a group chat. Do not explain what an outpatient claim is, since the readers already know. Avoid jargon and corporate phrases such as "exciting" or "we are pleased to announce".
Add the first to anything that involves facts, because it turns a silent invention into a visible blank you can fill in yourself.
Priya's full request started with her context paragraph from lesson 1.2 and then went on: Write the announcement. Keep it under 80 words, because staff read it on their phones, and write it the way a supervisor who knows the drivers would post in the group chat. Start date in the first line, HR counter hours in the last. No greeting or sign-off, no explanation of what an outpatient claim is, and no details I have not given you, such as how to download the app.
What came back was 71 words long, opened with the date and needed one word changed, though runs do not always go that smoothly. Models sometimes ignore one instruction in a list, especially when several pull in different directions, such as "very short" and "include all the details". When that happens, notice which instruction slipped. It tells you either that the instruction was unclear or that it clashed with another one, and both are easy to fix once you know.
You are about to test this on your own context paragraph. Keep your expectations realistic: the point of the run is less to get a perfect draft than to see which of your instructions the model treats as firm and which it treats as a suggestion.
Add three constraints and one format instruction to your context paragraph from lesson 1.2, run it, and mark which instruction the output ignored.
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