How to Write a Prompt for ChatGPT

Why is it so important to know how to write prompts correctly?

LLM versions are updated weekly, each new version breaks all kinds of performance records, but all models remain imperfect.

Chatbots are prone to hallucinations, may answer a different question than the one that was asked, or the quality of the answer may be unsatisfactory. This can be fixed if you write a грамотный prompt.

Let’s take a look at the components of an ideal prompt for ChatGPT.

• Role
• Context
• Task
• Format
• Example
• Tone

Role

Imagine that you are addressing a specialist. For example, you need to come up with contests for your colleagues at work. Assign this role to the chatbot:

“You are an experienced corporate event organizer. Come up with 5 contests for my colleagues”

You can use any professions or even the names of famous people:

“You are Elon Musk. Come up with 5 ideas for an internet startup”

Context

Like a human, an LLM cannot read minds (at least at the time of writing this article). Therefore it is very important to immerse it in context and provide as much initial information as possible.

Example of poor context:

“Come up with a contest for colleagues at work”

ChatGPT will choose the best option from many possible contests, but it is not guaranteed that it will be what you need.

Let’s expand the context:

“I work in a team of 12 people. We want to celebrate Halloween. Come up with 5 contests in an online format.”

Now the LLM understands what the situation is about and will not suggest contests for an office.

Task

The task should contain a verb (come up with, generate, write), be clear and fairly simple. If your task is too complex, it is better to break it into several subtasks

Poor task:

“Come up with 5 online contests, create visual designs for them and a results table”

Good task:


1. Come up with 5 online contests
2. Create visual design for contest 1 (2,3 etc)
3. Create a final results table for the participants

Format

Visualization of the result works well both in everyday life and in writing a prompt. Tell ChatGPT how you imagine the result. It could be a resume in PDF format, a report in an Excel table, or Python code.

“Come up with 5 contests in an online format. The contests must be conducted in Figma. Divide the participants into teams”

Example

Add an example to the prompt if you have an idea of the desired result. This will help achieve a higher-quality answer.

“Come up with 5 contests in an online format. Here are examples of contests that were held last year: [...]”

Tone

ChatGPT can adapt to the tone of the prompt.

You can ask it to be more friendly if you need to come up with a birthday greeting for your aunt’s dog, or strict and professional if you are generating a resume for applying to Google.

“We want to have a good time and laugh”

Summary

Let’s summarize. To write a good prompt for ChatGPT you should specify the role of the chatbot, expand the context, clearly formulate the task, add examples, define the format and set the tone. 

The final prompt will look like this

“You are an experienced corporate event organizer.

I work in a team of 12 people. We want to celebrate Halloween. Come up with 5 contests in an online format.

The contests must be conducted in Figma. Divide the participants into teams.

Example of a contest that was held last year: ”Participants need to guess the name of a Valentine’s Day themed movie encoded as emojis”

We want to have a good time and laugh“

Follow these rules every time when writing a prompt. Then ChatGPT’s answers will become more useful and you will save time and tokens.

Or use our service, it takes all these rules into account automatically.