Writing better
prompts

Providing reference text to LLMs models can improve answers.  Types of content that can be included:

• Source Content provided by SMEs

• The lesson plan

• Task Analysis

• Knowledge Assessment

• Emails

Example:

Use the provided articles delimited by triple quotes to answer questions. If the answer cannot be found in the articles, write "I could not find an answer." 

You will be provided with a document delimited by triple quotes and a question. 

Your task is to answer the question using only the provided document and to cite the passage(s) of the document used to answer the question.

If the document does not contain the information needed to answer this question then simply write: "Insufficient information."

If an answer to the question is provided, it must be annotated with a citation.

Use the following format for to cite relevant passages ({"citation": …}). """<insert document here>"""

Question: <insert question here>

Complex tasks tend to have higher error rates than simpler tasks. "Chain-of thought" (CoT)  prompting involves providing an example with intermediate reasoning steps or asking the LLM to think step by step.

Worse:

Generate 5-7 knowledge-level objectives. 

Better

Generate 5-7 knowledge-level objectives. Ensure each objective starts with a verb. Nest enabling objectives under terminal objectives. Only use the words in the text. Refer to this text [...]

Worse:

Summarize the text, which is in the quotes " " 

Better

Summarize this text in a about 50-100 words. Use bullet points wherever possible. Write the summary so that a tenth grader can understand it. Refer to this text [...]

Define the role you want the LLM to take on. Give the LLM a:

• A job title

• Level of experience (e.g novice, expert, senior)

• Personality traits (e.g creative, cautious)

• Specialties

Examples

• Act a senior ux designer who specializes in usability training

• You are experienced ceramics teacher who is just starting to learn about watercolor

• You are a robot tutor

• You are a Personal Trainer. You have knowledge about nutritional data, exercise science, and other relevant information. Always answer with the goal of improving strength, fitness, and health. (Source: W3Schools.com) 

• You are a Lawyer. You have knowledge about the law, past precedence, and other relevant information. Always answer with the goal of giving advice on how to best use the situation but also stay within the parameters of the law.

• You are a historian

Describe the target audience by providing relevant details:

• A job title

• A role

• Level of experience (e.g novice, expert, senior)

• Age

• Personality traits (e.g creative, cautious)

• Specialties

Examples

• Your audience are tech-savby teenagers in the 7th grade, learning physics

• Write to adults who want to learn about pottery but who don't have much time

• Your audience are board members of a hospital

• Your audience are engineers honing their leadership skills

Include details of how you want the response to be displayed or formatted.  Common formats include:

• List of learning objectives

• Detailed example

• Quiz

• Bullet points for slides

Including examples in a prompts is called few-shot prompting. Basically you're demonstating to the model how to respond to your query. 

For simple tasks, one example (1-shot) will suffice. For more difficult tasks, we can experiment with increasing the demonstrations (e.g., 3-shot, 5-shot, 10-shot, etc.).

Task

Sentiment analysis

Example prompt

This is awesome! // Positive

This is bad! // Positive

Wow that movie was rad! // Positive

What a horrible show! //

Example response

Negative

Provide the model rules to follow: 

Length 

• • "Write 5-7 paragraphs"

  • "Write 250-300 words" (Note that a specific number of words "300 words" might not work as well as providing a range)

Keywords 

• • "Include the following words..."

Vocabulary

• • "In your response, use a college-level reading level"

Audience's age 

• • "Explain this to me like I'm five years old"

Example

Summarize the text in the triple quotes in about 3-4 sentences. """insert text here"""

Provide relevant context and background information related to your topic, project and desired response.