Lesson 10 of 25

Commence with the End in Mind

Describe the finished thing before you ask for it - its length, its shape, its tone, and the test it has to pass - rather than describing the activity you want performed. "Summarise this" names an activity; "five bullets a colleague could brief from" names an object, and only the second gives the model something to aim at and you something to judge against.

Reach for it whenWhen you can picture what a good answer looks like but keep getting something adjacent to it - right topic, wrong shape.

Open with a section describing the finished artefact - its length, structure, tone and the test it must pass - before you describe the source material or the method. Put the long pasted input last. Then add a checks section asking for what was left out or what claims rest on nothing, because the gap between the object you described and the object you got is where the useful information lives.

Worth knowingDescribing the end well does not stop invention. When the brief asks for optimism and the data does not support it, something has to give - say explicitly which claims are off-limits, or the tone requirement will quietly manufacture the facts that justify it.
  • Describe the artefact before the source material.
  • Name the test the output must pass, not just its length.
  • Ban the specific claims your data cannot support.
  • Ask for a claims audit against your data points.
  • Mark where a quote would go; do not let one be invented.
Example 1: Focusing a Summarization Task

Instead of

I need a five-bullet point summary of the following text. The text is a transcript of a long interview with a scientist about climate change. Please make sure the tone is serious. [Paste 3000-word interview transcript].

Perplexity version

## WHAT I WANT AT THE END
Five bullet points. Each one a complete sentence, 25 to 35 words, serious in tone. Together they should let a reader who has not seen the interview explain the scientist's position to someone else. Nothing before the five bullets, nothing after them except the two lines described under CHECKS.

## WHAT THIS IS
A transcript of an interview with a leading climate scientist. The main threads are rising sea levels, carbon capture technology, and policy recommendations. Spoken interview, so expect digressions, half-finished sentences and interviewer questions that do not matter.

## HOW TO GET THERE
Read the whole transcript first. Identify the scientist's strongest claim on each of the three threads, plus the two most significant things said outside those threads. That is your five. Do not allocate one bullet per thread mechanically if the interview weights them unevenly - follow the interview.

## CHECKS
After the five bullets:
- "Left out:" one line naming the most significant thing you had to drop.
- "Hedged:" one line naming anything the scientist stated tentatively that a bullet makes sound more certain than they did. This is the usual failure in summarising scientists and I want it visible.

## TRANSCRIPT
```
[Paste 3000-word interview transcript]
```
Open Perplexity 1,299 characters
Example 2: Ensuring Persona Adherence

Instead of

Act as William Shakespeare and write a sonnet about my new smartphone. It has a great camera and a long battery life. It's a very modern device.

Perplexity version

## THE FINISHED OBJECT
A 14-line sonnet. Shakespearean form: three quatrains and a closing couplet, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, iambic pentameter throughout. Early modern English diction - thou, thy, doth - used consistently rather than sprinkled. It should be readable aloud without stumbling.

## SUBJECT
A modern smartphone, praised as a marvel. The two features to celebrate:
- the camera, as an "all-seeing eye"
- the long-lasting battery, as a "tireless heart"

The volta - the turn in thought - should come at line 9, and the closing couplet should land a conceit that resolves the poem rather than merely restating it.

## THE HARD PART
Shakespeare had no word for a phone, a battery or a photograph. Do not use those words. Describe the device through metaphor and period-plausible language only. If you find yourself writing "device" or "screen", you have broken the persona.

## OUTPUT
1. The sonnet.
2. Below it, a line headed "Scansion note" - name any line where the iambic pentameter is imperfect, and say so honestly. A poem presented as metrically clean when it is not is the failure mode here.
3. A line headed "Anachronisms" - any word or concept in your own poem that Shakespeare could not have used.

If you plan to write several of these, say what belongs in a Custom GPT so the form and the diction rules do not have to be restated.
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Example 3: Complex Data-to-Text Generation

Instead of

Take this data and write a short news report about it. The data is about Q3 sales figures. Our company, 'Innovate Hyderabad', sold 50,000 units. This is up 20% from Q2. Our main competitor sold 45,000 units. The report should be optimistic.

Perplexity version

## THE DELIVERABLE
A news report of approximately 150 words for a business publication. Optimistic in tone but factual in substance - the optimism comes from how the numbers are framed, not from adjectives you add. Written as a journalist would: a lead sentence carrying the main news, then supporting detail, then the competitive context.

## AUDIENCE
Business readers who will not have heard of either company.

## DATA - use nothing but this
```
Company: 'Innovate Hyderabad'
Quarter: Q3 2025
Units sold: 50,000
Quarter-over-quarter growth: +20% (against Q2)
Main competitor (Zenith Corp) units sold: 45,000
```

## RULES ABOUT THE DATA
- Do not invent revenue, market share percentages, headcount, product names or executive quotes. If a real news report would normally carry a quote, leave a clearly marked placeholder rather than writing one.
- "Market leadership" is a claim the data does not support - 50,000 units against one competitor's 45,000 says nothing about the whole market. Write the lead so it is true: you may say the company outsold Zenith Corp this quarter. Do not say it leads the market.
- Q2 units are not given, so do not state them even as an inference.

## OUTPUT
1. Headline and the report.
2. "Claims audit" - a short list of every factual claim in your report and the data point it rests on. Any claim that does not map to a data point is a problem; flag it rather than letting me find it.
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