How to Write Good Prompts

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

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

In our stock recipe, the verbs aren’t very important: “bring,” “lower,” “strain.” You’re cooking ingredients in water at various temperatures, so those actions are obvious. But conditions or heuristics describing when to move between verbs are important: first when the water reaches a simmer, then after ninety minutes passes. And while it’s not wor... See more

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

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

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

We could write a prompt which simply asks: “What do you need to make chicken stock?” But this isn’t precise enough: should we recall the quantities or just the names of the ingredients? How much chicken stock are we making? This isn’t focused enough: because it’s asking for so many details simultaneously, it’s unlikely to sharply activate all the m... See more

Now, prompts are cheap, but they’re not free. Besides their time cost, they have an emotional cost: no one wants to spend time reviewing a bunch of boring material they already know. So if you’re writing prompts for a subject that’s already quite familiar, you should use fewer prompts—not because it’s always safe to write coarser questions for fami... See more

Retrieval practice prompts should be

effortful

. It’s important that the prompt actually involves retrieving the answer from memory. You shouldn’t be able to trivially infer the answer. Cues are helpful, as we’ll discuss later—just don’t “give the answer away.” In fact, effort appears to be an important factor in the effects of retrieval practice.

F... See more