How I Write Prompts for AI (As Taught by Google)

The 4-part formula for writing ChatGPT prompts that work

Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash

Massive AI prompts are off-putting to read, let alone use. The good news is you don’t need to write endless paragraphs of instructions, which are all the rage on social, to get good outputs.

I spent a dozen hours reading documentation from Google and Claude’s prompt engineers. They provide a straightforward framework for crafting AI prompts.

An effective AI prompt has four essential parts.

Persona: Tell AI who it should be. This sets the tone and expertise level.
Task: Specify exactly what you want, with clear parameters.
Context: Share your goals and any relevant examples.
Format: Define how you want the output structured.

Here’s your fill-in-the-blank template to get started:

You’re a [role] who [key characteristic].
I need [specific task] for [target audience/purpose].
Here’s my [context/examples].
Please format the output as [desired format].

Here’s a before-and-after showing how this works: