You will be able to get answers from a document that you can check in seconds.
Hui Min now had the tenancy agreement as a proper digital PDF, eighteen pages long. She asked the assistant who pays for aircon servicing. The answer was clear: the tenant pays for regular servicing every three months, and the landlord pays for repairs. It sounded reasonable and exactly like many agreements she had heard about. She had no idea whether it was what this agreement said.
That is the gap this lesson closes. An answer about a document is only useful if you can check it quickly, and you can only check it quickly if you know where in the document to look.
Change the question so that every answer comes with its evidence. Add a line like this to your request: "For each answer, give the exact words from the document that support it, in quotation marks, and the clause or page number where they appear."
Now the answer looks different. Instead of a summary, Hui Min got: "Clause 6(c), page 7: 'The Tenant shall at the Tenant's own cost engage a qualified contractor to service the air-conditioning units once every three months.'" She turned to page 7 and there it was. Checking took ten seconds, compared with reading eighteen pages.
Asking for the quote does more than make checking easy. It pushes the model to ground its answer in the text in front of it, rather than in what tenancy agreements usually say, which is where a confident wrong answer tends to come from. AI fundamentals lesson 6.1, Why a fluent answer can still be false, explained why a typical-sounding answer comes so easily.
Models fill gaps by default, as lesson 1.3, Set constraints and ask for the format you need, warned. Ask about something the document does not cover and many assistants will answer anyway, drawing on general knowledge and presenting it as if it came from the file.
So say what you want when the answer is not there: "If the document does not answer a question, say 'not found in the document' and do not fill the gap from general knowledge." Then you can tell the difference between "the agreement says X" and "the agreement says nothing about this", which in a contract is often the more important answer.
Hui Min asked whether the agreement had a diplomatic clause, the kind that lets a tenant end the lease early if they are posted overseas. The answer came back as not found in the document. She checked the contents page and the termination section, confirmed it was missing, and asked the agent about it before signing.
A quote with a page number is easy to check, so check it. A model can paraphrase while claiming to quote, tidying the wording, merging two clauses or quietly changing a "may" to a "shall". It can also give the wrong page. Most of the time the quote is accurate, but the cases where it is not are the ones that matter.
The quickest check is a text search. Open the original PDF, press the search shortcut, and paste in a few distinctive words from the quote. If the words come up and match, you are done. If they do not come up at all, treat the quote as unreliable until you have found the real passage yourself. Search for a short phrase rather than the whole quote, since a single changed word will make a long search fail even when the rest is right.
For a scanned document, text search may not work, which is one more reason to get the digital version, as lesson 5.1, What happens when you upload a file, suggested.
When you have a list of questions, it is tempting to ask them all in one message. For a casual read of a brochure, that is fine. For a contract, a policy, a set of terms or anything you will sign or rely on, ask them one at a time.
The reason is the same one that lesson 3.1, Why one giant prompt gives you a mediocre result, gave for big tasks. A batch of ten questions gets ten shorter, shallower answers, and an error in one can colour the next. One question per message gives each answer the model's full attention, a separate quote, and a separate check from you.
Hui Min's important questions were the notice period, who pays for repairs, what happens to the deposit, whether she could have a guest stay over, and the early termination rules. She asked each separately with the quote-and-page instruction, and checked each quote in the PDF as it came in. Three of the five answers matched exactly. One quote had slightly smoothed the wording. One gave the right clause with the wrong page number. None of the differences changed her decision, but she only knew that because she had checked.
The method is easiest to learn on a document you have a real interest in. Find a tenancy agreement, insurance policy or set of terms that applies to you, ideally as a digital PDF, and write down five questions you would genuinely like answered about it.
Ask five questions about a tenancy agreement or insurance policy using the quote-and-page method, then verify each quote in the original.
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