You will be able to write revision instructions that change the right things and leave the rest alone.
Most feedback people give an assistant sounds like this: make it better, make it more friendly, too long, try again. It is the same feedback you might scribble on a colleague's draft at the end of a long day, and it gets the same result. The next version is different, but not in the way you wanted, and sometimes it is worse.
Marcus, the account manager from lesson 4.1, had marked up his renewal email against his brief. He knew what to keep and what to change. This lesson is about turning those notes into instructions that produce a better second draft, instead of a different one.
"Make it better" gives the model nothing to act on. It does not know which part you mean, what is wrong with it, or what better looks like. Faced with that, it changes a little of everything, and the parts you liked are as likely to change as the parts you did not.
Instead, quote the exact sentence or name the exact section. "The closing line, 'Please let us know at your earliest convenience if you would like to arrange a call', is too formal" points at one thing. So does "the first paragraph" or "the bullet about response times". The model now knows precisely where to work.
Quoting also protects you from a quiet misunderstanding. If you say "the ending is too formal", the model has to decide where the ending starts. If you quote it, there is nothing to decide.
A quoted instruction tells the model what to change. A reason tells it why, and the why is what lets the fix carry through the rest of the draft.
Compare two pieces of feedback on the same line. "Make the closing line less formal." And: "The closing line is too formal for a client I have worked with for nine years and usually message on WhatsApp. Make it sound like how I would actually end a note to him." The second one fixes the closing line, and it also tells the model something about the whole relationship, so it is far more likely to soften the stiff phrasing elsewhere too.
Reasons work because they are a kind of context, added at the point you discovered it was missing. "Too formal for a long-time client" is information about the reader. "Too long because he reads email on his phone between site visits" is information about the situation. Each time you give a reason, the model gets a little more of what lesson 1.2, Give context the way you would brief a colleague, asked for.
It is tempting to list every problem at once: change the opening, move the fee down, cut the second paragraph, make the tone warmer, add a line about the new helpdesk, remove the jargon, and shorten the subject line. Long lists of edits like this often get partly ignored. The model handles some well, some halfway and drops one or two altogether, and you then have to read the whole draft again to find out which.
One or two changes per round works better. Start with the change that matters most, usually structure or content, then move to tone, then to wording. Lesson 4.4, Take a draft through three rounds, gives you an order to follow. Each round is quicker to check, because you know exactly what should have changed.
Even a clear, quoted instruction can trigger a rewrite of the whole draft. Models tend to treat a revision request as an invitation to produce a fresh version, and in the process, paragraphs you were happy with get reworded, facts get rounded and good lines disappear.
So say explicitly what not to touch. "Change only the opening paragraph and the closing line. Keep everything else exactly as it is, including the fee and the start date." For a long document, you can go further and ask for the revised section on its own, which you then paste into place yourself. That way the rest of the document cannot drift.
Here is Marcus's first round of feedback, put together:
"Two changes. First, the email opens with the fee increase, which makes it read like a bill to a client who has been with us for nine years. Open with a line about working together instead, and move the fee to the second paragraph. Second, the closing line, 'Please let us know at your earliest convenience if you would like to arrange a call', is too formal for him. End the way I would end a WhatsApp message to him, something short like offering to drop by. Do not change anything else, and keep the fee, the start date and the helpdesk paragraph exactly as written."
The second draft opened warmly, put the fee where he wanted it, closed with a line he would actually say, and left everything else alone. It needed one more small round on the subject line.
Feedback like this takes a minute longer to write than "make it friendlier", and it saves several rounds of guessing. The quickest way to get the habit is to look at feedback you have already given and see how it would read rewritten. Scroll back through your recent chats for three of your own vague revision requests.
Rewrite three vague pieces of feedback you have given an assistant into quoted, reasoned instructions, and run them to compare results.
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