I do a lot of writing at my job, and find myself using AI more and more for drafting. I find it especially helpful when I am stuck.
Like any human assigned with a writing task, Claude cannot magically guess what you want. I find that when I see other people get lackluster writing results with AI, it’s very often due to providing almost no context for the AI to work with.
When asking for help with a draft, I will often write out a few paragraphs of thoughts on the draft. For example, if I were brainstorming ideas for a title, I might write out a prompt like:
“I am looking to create a title for the following document: <document>.
My current best attempt at a title is: ’Why LLMs need context to do good work’
I think this title does a good job at explaining the core message, namely that LLMs cannot guess what you want if you don’t provide sufficient context, but it does a poor job at communicating <some other thing I care about communicating>.
Please help brainstorm ten other titles, from which we can ideate.”
Perhaps Claude comes up with two good titles, or one title has a word I particularly like. Then I might follow up saying:
“I like this word, it captures <some concept> very well. Can we ideate a few more ideas using this word?”
From this process, I will usually get out something good, which I wouldn’t have been able to think of myself. Usually I’ll take those sentences, work them into my draft, and continue.
Strong agree about context. As a shortcut / being somewhat lazy, I usually give it an introduction I wrote, or a full pitch, then ask it to find relevant literature and sources, and outline possible arguments, before asking it to do something more specific.
I then usually like starting a new session with just the correct parts, so that it’s not chasing the incorrect directions it suggested earlier—sometimes with explicit text explaining why obvious related / previously suggested arguments are wrong or unrelated.
I do a lot of writing at my job, and find myself using AI more and more for drafting. I find it especially helpful when I am stuck.
Like any human assigned with a writing task, Claude cannot magically guess what you want. I find that when I see other people get lackluster writing results with AI, it’s very often due to providing almost no context for the AI to work with.
When asking for help with a draft, I will often write out a few paragraphs of thoughts on the draft. For example, if I were brainstorming ideas for a title, I might write out a prompt like:
Perhaps Claude comes up with two good titles, or one title has a word I particularly like. Then I might follow up saying:
From this process, I will usually get out something good, which I wouldn’t have been able to think of myself. Usually I’ll take those sentences, work them into my draft, and continue.
Strong agree about context. As a shortcut / being somewhat lazy, I usually give it an introduction I wrote, or a full pitch, then ask it to find relevant literature and sources, and outline possible arguments, before asking it to do something more specific.
I then usually like starting a new session with just the correct parts, so that it’s not chasing the incorrect directions it suggested earlier—sometimes with explicit text explaining why obvious related / previously suggested arguments are wrong or unrelated.