Examples beat adjectives

Why "make it warmer" keeps failing

Ask for warmer and you get more exclamation points. Ask for professional and you get "I hope this message finds you well". Ask for concise and you get the same content with the connectives removed. Adjectives about style are the weakest instructions available, because every one of them is an average of millions of documents that somebody once labelled that way.

You have something much stronger sitting in your sent folder.

Show, do not describe

Paste in two or three things you have already written that are close to what you want, then ask for a new one of the same kind. This is the technique researchers call few-shot prompting, and in office work it is the difference between output you rewrite and output you edit.

Here are three grant reports I wrote last year. Write the fourth, for the project described below, matching how these are structured and how they sound.

What travels across from your examples, without you having to name any of it: sentence length, how you open, whether you use headings, whether you use "we" or the passive, how you handle bad news, how formal your sign-off is, the vocabulary specific to your field, and the things you conspicuously never say.

You could not have written those rules down. You do not need to.

Building a voice file once

Spend twenty minutes and you will not repeat this.

1. Find three to five documents you are genuinely happy with, of the type you write most. Your best letter, a report that landed well, an email that resolved something.
2. Strip out names, client identifiers and anything confidential. This is not optional — the confidentiality module explains exactly why.
3. Put them in one file with a line at the top: These are examples of how I write [document type]. Match the structure and register, not the content.
4. Keep it where you can find it in five seconds.

For a recurring document, add a counter-example: one paragraph in the style you do not want, labelled as such. This is what our old template sounded like. Do not write like this. Contrast is informative — it tells the model which features of the good examples are the load-bearing ones.

Some tools let you store this permanently, as custom instructions, a project or a "gem". Use those when you have them. The plain file works everywhere and survives you changing tools, which you will.

Where the technique is strongest

• A house style nobody has documented. Every organisation has one. Examples capture it in minutes; a style guide takes months and is ignored.
• Writing in a second language. This is the biggest win in the lesson. Description gets you correct, flat English. Three examples of how a good colleague writes gets you plausible English of the right register — and gives you something to learn from rather than merely to send.
• Highly patterned documents. Case notes, inspection reports, minutes, standard clauses. Two examples and the structure locks.
• Formats with a fixed shape. Give one example of a completed template and the output will fit the template, which no amount of describing the template achieves.

Three failure modes to expect

Facts leak from the examples. The model has three real letters in front of it and may carry a number or a client name from one into the new one. Read specifically for this. Strip identifying detail from your examples and you have removed both the confidentiality risk and most of this problem at once.

Style leaks in the wrong direction. If your three examples are all bad-news letters, a good-news letter written from them will sound oddly grave. Match your examples to the occasion.

Averaging. Five examples that differ a lot produce a middle that is none of them. Two or three consistent examples beat six varied ones.

The point that is not about efficiency

There is a version of this that quietly improves your writing rather than replacing it. Paste in a document you admire — a colleague's, a well-drafted judgment, a good policy brief — and ask what makes it work: sentence structure, ordering, where the reader is told the conclusion. Then write your own.

You have used the tool as an analyst rather than as a ghostwriter, and what you keep afterwards is the skill. That distinction returns at the very end of this course, and it is the one that decides whether you are better at your job in three years or merely faster at producing documents.