The art of the prompt

Prompts are simple at first, but there's an art to get exactly what you want. To get started just ask Copilot and you'll get a response. But as you get responses you'll realize that you needed something a little more "on the nose". Let's take a quick look.

Let's start with a basic prompt. Write me an article about using Copilot. Before that, let's make sure we have a new topic and set the tone to be creative.

That's not bad. But I needed something longer. So now, that Copilot has the context or topic, I can simply ask for the change. "Can you increase that to 1000 words?" Or I can ask "Can you add a couple of Metaphors?"

And on and on we can go. But let's say I need to do this 5 times a week. We can do this in one prompt and we can make that prompt an easy-to-use template that I save in OneNote but you can put it wherever. Here's the prompt formula that works well with Copilot that sounds conversational for me too.

GOAL > CONTEXT > EXPECTATIONS > SOURCE

• GOAL: What do you want?
• CONTEXT: Why do you need it? Who is the output for?
• EXPECTATIONS: How should Copilot respond? What's the tone and other details of the output?
• SOURCE: Is there any particular information Copilot should use in the writing?

Or GCES (pronounced G Kess) for short. (I just made that acronym up but it's going to catch on if I can get a Kardashian to take my course and use it on TV or whatever.)

To make a prompt I'll pull the pieces out and then string them back together.

So the pieces are:

• Write me an article about using Copilot.
• Can you expand that to 750-1000 words, please?
• Can you add more metaphors? At least one for every 3 facts.
• Can you set the tone to be more conversational? Like I'm explaining Copilot to a friend over a cup of coffee, please.

Then I'll string this together into something like: "Write me a 750-1000 word article about TOPIC. I'm writing an article for professionals. Please add 1 metaphor for every 3 facts. Use bullets, and bold where appropriate. Add two or three sentences or phrases in blockquotes that are good for retweeting, etc. Set the tone as conversational, like I'm explaining the concept to a friend over a cup of coffee. Make sure to keep the reader engaged. Pull information from SOURCE."

Honestly, I drop the source a lot of the time. But it's good to have in case you're asking for a product brief or something using your internal content.

Then I can just copy and paste this into Copilot every time I need an article or whatever it is I need.

Don't worry, there are a ton of prompts available. I'll also show you how to generate prompt ideas later on.

Prompting gets a lot easier once you've read a few and tried a couple of them out. It will be as easy as Googling I promise. Even easier because you can ask Copilot to create the prompt!

This is the official way but I think different and personally I think it's easier to remember.