Nobody does good work from memory
You would never hand a freelancer a job and refuse to send them the file. Yet that is what most people do with AI every day. They describe the report instead of pasting it. They say "in our usual style" to something that has never seen your usual style. Then they are disappointed that the output is generic.
Generic input, generic output. The single biggest jump in quality available to you is not a cleverer instruction. It is attaching the material.
In plain English
- Source material:
- The real documents, notes or data the job is actually about.
- Style sample:
- Two or three things you wrote before, used to teach the AI your voice.
- Anonymising:
- Swapping real names, numbers and identifiers for placeholders before you paste.
- Grounding:
- Telling the AI to work only from what you supplied, not from general knowledge.
Three kinds of material, three different jobs
Source material is what the work is about. The transcript, the spreadsheet export, the policy document, the twelve customer replies. Paste it or attach it. Do not summarise it for the AI; summarising is the job you are handing over.
Examples of your own work teach voice and format. Two past newsletters, three of your status updates, one memo you were proud of. This takes a minute to set up and pays out forever.
Real data is what turns a plausible answer into a correct one. Numbers you paste get used. Numbers you do not paste get invented.
โ Weak prompt
Prompt
Summarise our customer feedback from last quarter. It was mostly about slow delivery and some pricing complaints.
Output
Customers this quarter raised concerns primarily around delivery speed, with a secondary theme of pricing sensitivity. Overall sentiment appears mixed, with opportunities to improve fulfilment timelines.
It has summarised your sentence, not your feedback. Every word came from you. You have paid a machine to rephrase your own guess.
โ Good prompt
Prompt
Below are 40 customer comments from last quarter, anonymised. Group them into themes, order the themes by how often they appear, give a count for each, and quote two representative comments per theme. Work only from these comments. If a theme is too small to be meaningful, say so rather than padding the list. [comments pasted]
Output
Six themes with counts, ordered by frequency, two real quotes each, and a note that two of the six had only one mention.
The findings come from the data instead of from your impression, including the one theme you had not noticed.
Checkpoint
Do not describe the material. Attach it. If you find yourself summarising a document so the AI can summarise it, you are doing the job twice.
Anonymise on the way in
Here is the habit worth building: before anything leaves your machine, do a find and replace. It takes fifteen seconds and it removes almost every reason to worry.
Real names become Customer A, Colleague B, Supplier C. Account numbers, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses become placeholders. Salaries and unannounced figures either come out or become a range.
The important insight is that this costs you nothing in quality. The AI does not need to know that the angry customer is called Rebecca Ellsworth of 14 Bridge Road to write her a good reply. It needs to know what went wrong and what you can do about it.
Never paste anything covered by a signed agreement, anything from a personnel file, anything medical, or anything under embargo. If you would not read it aloud in a busy cafe, it does not go in the chat box. And check your employer's policy before you paste work documents anywhere.
Before pasting, replace:
Real names become Customer A, Colleague B, Manager C
Company names become Supplier X, Client Y (unless public and relevant)
Account numbers, addresses, phone numbers, emails become [REMOVED]
Exact salaries or unannounced figures become a band, or [FIGURE]
Then tell it:
Names and figures in this document have been replaced with placeholders.
Keep the placeholders exactly as they are in your output. Do not invent real
names or real numbers to fill them in.
Teach it your voice once
The complaint "it does not sound like me" has a fifteen-second cure that most people never try.
Below are three things I wrote. Study them for sentence length, formality,
how I open and close, and the words I avoid.
Then write [the new thing] in that same voice. Match the rhythm, not the topic.
Do not copy phrases from the samples.
SAMPLE 1:
[paste]
SAMPLE 2:
[paste]
SAMPLE 3:
[paste]
THE NEW THING:
[brief]
Keep your three samples in a note on your phone or desktop. Pasting them becomes a two-second habit, and it is the difference between output that sounds like you and output that sounds like a mid-ranking diplomat.
Ground it in what you gave it
Even with material attached, an assistant will happily blend your document with things it half remembers from the internet. One line stops that.
Work only from the material I have pasted below. Do not add facts, figures,
dates or examples from general knowledge.
If the material does not answer part of my request, write NOT IN THE SOURCE
rather than filling the gap.
At the end, list anything I asked for that the material could not support.
MATERIAL:
[paste]
WHAT I NEED:
[brief]
Here is everything you need for this job.
WHAT THE WORK IS ABOUT: [paste the document, data or transcript]
HOW WE NORMALLY DO IT: [paste one past example]
WHO IT IS FOR: [audience and what they know]
HARD FACTS: [the real dates, figures and names you are willing to share]
OFF LIMITS: [anything not to mention]
NOW PRODUCE: [the finished thing]
The share-enough rule
There is a middle ground between pasting your entire client folder and pasting nothing. Ask one question: what does this job actually need?
A reply to a complaint needs the complaint and what you can offer, not the customer's account history. A summary of a meeting needs the transcript, not the calendar invites around it. A pricing memo needs the numbers being discussed, not the whole finance export. Share the working set, not the archive.
That rule keeps quality high and exposure low, which is the only combination worth having.
๐ Quiz
Question 1 of 4You want customer feedback themes. What produces the more useful result?