Writing a Clear Request in a Single Sentence

The treasurer of a badminton club wants to chase the members who haven't paid their dues. He types: "Write an email about the dues." The AI replies with a pleasant message announcing that registration is open, when what he needed was to ask for money from people who already play every Tuesday. It didn't do anything wrong: his request could have meant ten things, and it picked one.

Before launching into a twenty-line prompt, try writing your request in a single sentence that contains everything essential. It's a good exercise, and for many everyday tasks, it's also enough.

The five pieces of the sentence

A clear request answers five points, in any order:

Put end to end, it gives:

Write a reminder email for the members of our badminton club who haven't yet paid their €85 dues, so that they pay by bank transfer before November 15, in a friendly teammate tone and in 80 words maximum.

The sentence is long, but it reads in one go and leaves almost no decision to the machine. Compare it with "Write an email about the dues": the deliverable is there, everything else is missing.

The stranger test

Reread your sentence imagining that it lands with someone who doesn't know you and has never heard of your club. Can they write the email without calling you back? If they'd have to ask "for whom?" or "how much?", the answer is missing from your sentence, and that's exactly what the AI will have to make up.

The two most frequent omissions are the goal and the facts. We think of the deliverable and the form because they're easy to name, and we forget to say what the reader should do next.

When one sentence is no longer enough

The formula holds as long as the task stays simple. It cracks in three cases:

• you have long rules to follow, such as a style guide or a list of banned words;
• you're working from a document the AI has to read, to paste below the sentence;
• the result must always have the same structure, because you're going to use it twenty times.

In these cases, keep your sentence as the first line and add the rest below it, arranged in blocks. The anatomy of a good prompt details these blocks. To decide which facts deserve a place, the useful-context test will save you time.

The flaws that keep coming back

A clear sentence can still miss its target. Here's what slips in most often:

• Two hidden requests. "Write an email and suggest a schedule" is two jobs. Separate them.
• An adjective instead of a fact. "An effective email" says nothing. "An email that fits on one phone screen" can be checked.
• A goal that isn't an action. "To inform" is weak. "So that they answer yes or no by Friday" is precise.

Most of these points also appear in our beginner mistakes, with fixes.

To try now

Take the last request you sent to an AI and underline the five pieces. The ones you can't find are the ones it was missing. Rewrite the sentence with them, send it in a fresh conversation, and compare.