Asking well: the skill under every other skill.
ChatGPT's answers are a mirror of your questions. Vague in, vague out. This lesson gives you the five-part structure that reliably produces useful answers — and the one habit that matters more than any structure.
01 Why 'prompting' is just briefing
Forget the mystique. Prompting is the same skill as briefing a capable freelancer: they can do excellent work, but only if you tell them the job, the audience, and what good looks like. Nobody hands a freelancer three words and expects magic. Stop doing it to ChatGPT.
02 The five parts
| Part | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Role | Sets the expertise and voice | "You're an experienced HVAC estimator..." |
| Context | The situation only you know | "...I'm bidding a 4-unit retrofit, customer is price-sensitive..." |
| Task | The specific job | "...draft the bid cover letter..." |
| Constraints | Fences that prevent bad drafts | "...under 200 words, no discounts offered, confident but not pushy..." |
| Format | The shape of the output | "...as three short paragraphs I can paste into email." |
You don't need all five every time. But when an answer disappoints, the fix is almost always one of these five was missing — usually context or constraints.
03 Iteration beats perfection
Here's what separates people who get great results: they treat the first answer as the start of the conversation, not the end. Reply with corrections the way you would to a colleague: "Good, but shorter." "Less formal." "You assumed X — actually Y." Each correction compounds, because the model has the whole conversation as context. Three quick rounds beats one perfect mega-prompt, every time.
When you don't know what context to give, flip it: "Before you answer, ask me the five questions that would most improve your answer." ChatGPT is genuinely good at knowing what it needs. Let it interview you.
04 Three failure patterns to recognize
- The vague ask: "make this better" — better how? Name the dimension: shorter, warmer, more concrete, more skeptical.
- The buried question: three questions in one message gets you one shallow answer to each. One job per message.
- The trust fall: facts, numbers, laws, medical claims — always verify anything that would embarrass you if wrong. Our fact-checking lesson makes this fast.
Take a real task and write it as a five-part prompt. Then ask the same thing as one lazy sentence in a second chat. Compare. That difference is this whole lesson.
Open ChatGPT →This week's challenge
Rewrite your three most common asks — the things you'll request again and again — as five-part prompts, and save them in a note. Congratulations: you just built your first prompt library. (Pro+ members: we turn this into a full reusable system in the Power Prompt Library lesson.)