Fix the boss email prompt
Fix the boss email prompt
A colleague needs help drafting a status email to their manager and wrote this prompt. It is the classic package: topic given, situation missing.
Rewrite the prompt so a stranger could produce the right email without asking anything.
The weak prompt
Help me write an email to my boss about the project.
A strong version (self-assessment — not machine-graded)
Write a five-sentence status email to my manager about Project Atlas. Situation: the integration milestone slipped to October 4; everything else is on track; I need two more days of QA support to keep the new date. Tone: direct and solution-oriented, no excuses, no jargon. End with the specific ask as the last sentence.
Hint
The stranger test: would someone with zero context produce the right email?
Climb one rung past comfortable: replace every adjective with something countable.
Why this is the answer
The fixed prompt states one job with a checkable shape: who it is for, what happened, what to avoid and how it ends. Each specific requirement narrows the space of plausible outputs — that is the entire mechanism of “clear instructions”.