How to Write Good Prompts

Writing good prompts feels surprisingly similar to translating written text. When translating prose into another language, you’re asking: which words, when read, would light a similar set of bulbs in readers’ minds? It’s not a rote operation. If the passage involves allusion, metaphor, or humor, you won’t translate literally. You’ll try to find wor... See more

Writing good prompts often involves interpretation, a first step to creating understanding beyond what’s explicitly written.

Notice how I’ve broken the ingredient list down into many questions here, each focused and precise. I’ve noticed that people often feel a compulsion to economize on the number of prompts they write. Prompts seem to carry a per-unit “price,” so people naturally try to write fewer questions which cover more ground. But that’s counter-productive. Unle... See more

It’s helpful to add similar caveats to your prompts whenever you’re working with subjective, provisional, or incomplete information. In some sense, most of the prompts we’ve been writing are provisional: other recipes will probably do things somewhat differently. So we could phrase everything more tentatively, but in practice that’s more distractin... See more

To internalize a concept, you need to understand its components and relationships.

Relatedly, the appropriate scale of a “focused” prompt depends on the scale of the concepts you’ve internalized. This particular set of aromatics is so deeply familiar as a group that I’d write prompts which treat it as a unit (“Italian aromatics”) instead of memorizing individual ingredients and quantities.

Retrieval practice prompts should be focused. A question or answer involving too much detail will dull your concentration and stimulate incomplete retrievals, leaving some bulbs unlit. Unfocused questions also make it harder to check whether you remembered all parts of the answer and to note places where you differed. It’s usually best to focus on ... See more

The recipe is quite linear, but more complex procedures may branch, including conditions or special cases which could trigger some alternate path in the flowchart. Such predicate structures are usually worth capturing. If the branching is sufficiently complex, you might consider drawing a flowchart and using that in your prompt.

Cues and elaborative encoding

If you find yourself struggling with these prompts, it can be helpful to add a cue, like this:

Q. Typical chicken stock aromatics:

• onion


• carrots


• celery


• garlic


• ??? (herb)

A. Parsley

But make sure the cue doesn’t render the prompt trivial: it’s important that you exert some effort to retrieve the answer from memory. Consider th... See more