General Education Unit.
Effective AI prompts-some things to consider.
1. Context-What is the environment and who are the players (include audience)?
Give enough detail but nothing peripheral. Are there any constraints?
2. Task-Give a clear description of what you are doing and what you want AI to do.
3. Specificity-Break the task down.
4. State tone-formal, upbeat, technical, entertaining, and so on.
5. State role- ‘Imagine you are….’
6. Show-give an example(s). Operator or AI.
7. State creativity level if possible. Lower for factual and technical content, higher
for artistic or unusual.
8. Explain-get AI to explain its thinking. ‘Walk me though your reasoning.’ Gets more
thoughtful content and enables you to spot flaws (chain of thought). This tends to
be linear.
9. Instruct the model to ask you questions at different stages of output.
10. Set boundaries. What do you not want?
11. Be structured-lists, data, bullet points. If input is structured output will be too.
12. Explore multiple possible paths to reach the solution (tree of thought). This
enables AI to think more like a human and get a little more tangential.
13. Rephrase. If the prompt does not get exactly what you want (you are in control)
then reword it.
14. Give an instruction to be unbiased.
15. Use controlling phrases such as: ‘your task is’ and ‘you must’, [System] do not
respond until I type “[User Action”.
16. Use output primers by ending your prompt with the start of the expected
response.
17. Incentivize the model. Offer a tip for a better answer. Strange but apparently true.
Some users indicate this works!
18. Iterate! See 11.
For further information, see. https://zerotomastery.io/blog/tree-of-thoughtprompting/#:~:text=Tree%20of%20Thoughts%20(ToT)%20stands,Here's%20why%20th
at%20matters:
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DFMD Propmts.doc June 2025