Pick something you were going to do anyway
The trouble with practising is that made up tasks produce made up satisfaction. So do not practise. Take one small thing sitting on your actual list today and hand it over.
Good candidates: a reply to an awkward email, a note to a neighbour about a shared fence, a shopping list for a meal you keep meaning to cook, an explanation of a letter from the council that reads like it was written in another century. Small, real, low stakes. Something where a mediocre result costs you nothing and a good result saves you twenty minutes.
In plain English
- Context:
- The background facts you give it. Who you are, who it is for, what happened. More context, better answer, almost every time.
- Follow up:
- Anything you type after the first reply, in the same conversation. It remembers what came before, so you do not have to repeat yourself.
- Tone:
- How something sounds. Warm, blunt, formal, apologetic. You can ask for a tone in plain words and it will adjust.
- Draft:
- A first version, meant to be changed. Almost everything it gives you is best treated this way.
Say more than feels necessary
Most disappointing answers come from requests that were too short to answer well. Not wrong, just thin. If you asked a helpful stranger the same question with the same amount of information, they would give you something equally vague.
Four things carry nearly all the weight. Who it is for. What you want to happen. Anything unusual about your situation. And roughly how long it should be.
None of that requires effort or polish. It is the same information you would give a friend who offered to write it for you, and you would not agonise over the wording then either. Two or three extra sentences of background is usually the entire difference between an answer you bin and an answer you send.
โ Weak prompt
Prompt
Write an email to my landlord about the boiler.
Output
Dear Landlord, I am writing to inform you that the boiler in my property is not functioning correctly. I would be grateful if you could arrange for a repair at your earliest convenience. Kind regards.
Nothing is wrong with this except that it is nobody's email. It does not know what the boiler does, how long it has been doing it, whether you have asked before, or whether you are annoyed. So it produces a shape rather than a letter, and you end up rewriting the whole thing.
โ Good prompt
Prompt
Write a short email to my landlord about the boiler. It has been making a loud banging noise for eight days and the hot water goes cold after a few minutes. I reported it by phone last Tuesday and nobody has come. I want it fixed this week but I am not trying to start a fight. Polite but clearly running out of patience. About six sentences.
Output
A six sentence email that names the fault, dates the first report, notes that nobody attended, asks for a visit this week, and stays civil while making the delay impossible to miss.
Same tool, same few seconds, completely different result. Every extra fact you supplied removed a guess it would otherwise have made badly. This is the whole skill, and there is not much more to it than this.
If writing all that background feels like more effort than the email itself, say it out loud instead using the microphone, or type it messily. Neatness earns you nothing here. Facts do.
When the answer misses, and it will
Here is the moment this lesson exists for. You will get a reply that is too formal, or too long, or subtly wrong about something you care about. Most people read it, feel a small flat disappointment, close the tab, and quietly decide the whole thing is overrated.
Do not do that. That reply was never meant to be the finished article. It was the opening offer.
Stay in the same conversation and say what was wrong. Not politely dressed up, just plainly. It has no feelings to spare and takes correction better than any colleague you have ever worked with.
Too formal. Rewrite it the way I would actually speak, and cut it to half the length.
The second paragraph is wrong. I have already paid the invoice, I am only asking about the late fee. Fix that and leave everything else as it was.
Give me three versions of this: one warmer, one shorter, one firmer. Do not explain them, just show me the three.
That last one is worth remembering when you cannot name what is bothering you. Seeing three variants side by side usually makes it obvious which direction you actually wanted, and you can then ask for more of that.
Two or three exchanges like this is completely normal. Experienced users almost never accept the first reply. They treat it as a lump of clay, and the second or third pass is where the real thing appears. If you take one habit away from this course, take that one.
Check anything factual before you rely on it. Dates, prices, names, rules, medical or legal specifics. It writes confidently whether or not it is right, and confident wrongness is the failure mode to watch for. For a letter about your boiler this hardly matters. For anything consequential, verify it elsewhere.
Checkpoint
Give it real background, treat the first reply as a draft, and say plainly what was wrong in the same conversation instead of giving up.
๐ Quiz
Question 1 of 4Your first reply comes back far too formal. What is the best next step?