You will be able to strip a one-off prompt down to a template with clear blanks for the parts that change.
Three months after the renewal email in module 4, another of Marcus's clients came up for renewal. He remembered that the prompt had worked well. He did not remember what was in it. He found the old chat after ten minutes of scrolling, copied the prompt, and then spent another ten minutes picking out the details that belonged to the first client: the name of the trading company, the nine years, the old fee, the helpdesk paragraph that had been specific to them.
A good prompt you cannot find, or cannot reuse without untangling it, gets written from scratch next time, usually worse. This module turns your best prompts into a library you will actually use, and it starts with converting a single prompt into a template.
A template is a prompt with the parts that worked kept as they are and the parts that change each time replaced with blanks. The blanks go in square brackets, with a short label that says what to put there: [client's business], [years as a client], [new monthly fee], [reason for increase].
Start from a prompt that produced a good result. Go through it line by line and sort each part into one of two piles. The first pile is what made it work: the context that sets up the situation, the examples, the constraints, the format and the things to avoid. These stay, word for word unless they mention a specific case. The second pile is what belonged to this one occasion: names, numbers, dates, the specific facts. These become blanks.
Here is part of Marcus's template after he sorted it: "I am an account manager at an IT support firm in Singapore. Draft a renewal email to [client contact's first name], who runs [client's business] and has been our client for [number of years]. Their monthly fee is rising from [old fee] to [new fee] from [start date] because [reason]. Open with a line about working together, put the fee in the second paragraph, and end the way I would end a short message to someone I know well. Keep it under 200 words. Give me a subject line and the body. Do not offer a discount and do not invent any service details I have not given you."
Every bracket is something he will know the next time. Everything outside the brackets is what he learnt across four rounds of feedback, and he will never have to learn it again.
Watch for buried specifics. A line like "keep the paragraph about the 24-hour helpdesk" was right for the first client and wrong for the next, so it became [any section to keep word for word, or delete this line].
At the top of each template, add a single line saying when to use it, and the checking level its output needs, from lesson 7.1, Match the check to what is at stake.
Marcus's line reads: "Use for renewal emails to existing clients with a fee change. Check level: full read, and check every figure and date against the contract." The when-to-use line stops you reaching for the wrong template on a similar-looking job, such as a first-time quote to a new client, which needs a different approach. The checking level means that, on a busy afternoon, the decision about how carefully to read the output has already been made by a calmer version of you.
Underneath the template, paste one example of good output it produced, with any confidential details removed or changed. It does two jobs.
First, it shows you what to expect, so you can tell at a glance whether a new run has come out right. Second, it is ready to use as an example inside the prompt if the template starts drifting, using the method from lesson 2.1, One good example beats a paragraph of description. Marcus saved the final version of his first renewal email, with the client details replaced by invented ones.
A template earns its place by saving time. If every output from it needs heavy editing, it is not doing that, and it should be fixed or deleted.
To fix it, look at what you keep changing. If you always shorten the output, tighten the length constraint. If you always rewrite the opening, add an instruction about the opening or a better example. If the problem is different each time, the template may be trying to cover jobs that are too different from each other, and splitting it into two narrower templates usually helps.
If you cannot fix it after a couple of tries, delete it. A library full of templates that half work is worse than a small one you trust, because you stop trusting any of them.
Two prompts are enough to start. Look back through the work you did in this course, such as the rewrites from lesson 1.4, the example prompt from lesson 2.4 or the feedback rounds from lesson 4.4, and pick the two that gave you the best results.
Convert two prompts you have used successfully into templates with blanks, a when-to-use line and a sample output.
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