Prompt Engineering
Get dramatically better answers from any AI
A beginner-to-advanced ladder of prompting techniques, each taught through a weak → strong prompt pair: be specific, give context, assign roles, show examples, structure with tags, think step by step, and ground answers in your sources. 18+ copy-ready examples.
After this chapter you can
→ Turn a vague request into a specific, well-scoped prompt
→ Use roles, examples, and delimiters to control the output
→ Apply chain-of-thought and prompt chaining to multi-step tasks
→ Ground answers in your sources to avoid made-up facts
Beginner Say what you actually want
Be specific Vague prompts get vague answers. Name the exact output you want.
✕ Summarize this paper.
✓ Summarize this paper in 5 bullet points for a first-year student: the research question, the method in one line, the key finding (with the number), the main limitation, and why it matters.
✕ Make this email better.
✓ Rewrite this email to my supervisor to be more concise and polite. Keep it under 80 words, keep the meeting request, and remove the apologetic tone.
Why it works: Naming the length, audience, and the exact things to include leaves nothing for the model to guess wrong.
Give context & audience Tell the model who it is helping and what for — the same question gets a different, better answer.
✕ Is this result significant?
✓ I'm a biology master's student. I ran a t-test and got p=0.04 with n=12. Explain whether this is statistically significant, what the small sample size means for how much I should trust it, and what I should check before reporting it.
Why it works: Context (who you are, the real numbers, your actual worry) lets the model pitch the depth correctly and answer the question behind the question.
Specify format & length If you need a table, a list, or a fixed length — ask for it explicitly.
✕ Compare these three sequencing methods.
✓ Compare Illumina, Nanopore, and PacBio sequencing as a markdown table with columns: method | read length | accuracy | cost | best use case. One short phrase per cell.
✕ Explain CRISPR.
✓ Explain CRISPR gene editing in exactly 3 short paragraphs: (1) what it is, (2) how the cut-and-repair works, (3) one real research use. Avoid jargon a high-schooler would not know.
Why it works: A requested structure gives you a scannable, consistent answer instead of a wall of text you have to re-read.