How to Write Good Prompts

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 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

Stock is made by simmering flavorful ingredients in water. By varying the ingredients, we can produce different types of stock: chicken stock, vegetable stock, mushroom stock, pork stock, and so on. But unlike a typical broth, stock isn’t meant to have a distinctive flavor that can stand on its own. Instead, its job is to provide a versatile founda... See more

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

As a form, recipes already involve a somewhat more explicit knowledge structure than you’d find in ordinary prose.

Understanding the ingredients in terms of functional grouping will help us internalize the structure of the recipe:

Q. Chicken stock is made with chicken, water, and what other category of ingredients?

A. Aromatics.

From here, we might ask:

Q. What are typical aromatics used in chicken stock?

A. onion, carrots, celery, garlic, and parsley

But unless you’... See more

Retrieval practice prompts should be precise about what they’re asking for. Vague questions will elicit vague answers, which won’t reliably light the bulbs you’re targeting.

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

This particular prompt is unlikely to require any extra help, but if you really find yourself struggling, you can add a prompt specifically intended to reinforce the association:

Q. Mnemonic device for carrots in chicken stock?

A. rhymes with “parrots”: picture a flock of parrots flying with carrots in their mouths, dropping them into a pot of stock