Lesson 24 of 25
The Treasure of Specificity
A vague request gets an average answer, because the model has to pick a middle of the road you did not describe. Every concrete detail you add - a word count, a named place, a numbered structure, who is reading it - removes a guess it would otherwise make for you. Specificity is not about writing a longer prompt; it is about replacing the decisions you left open with the ones you actually want.
The original prompts were written here and need only tightening - what the platform adds is that a specific can be a file rather than a description. Upload the CSV instead of pasting it, attach a photograph as a visual reference, point at a Doc. That is a sharper kind of specificity than any adjective. Keep standing specifics in a Gem, use grounding to make the time-sensitive details in the travel post actually current, and note that this is the one platform where the image example runs natively.
- A file beats a description - upload rather than paste.
- An attached photo is a visual specific for image prompts.
- Ground the perishable details; check each source's date.
- Big file still needs a precise question.
- Keep standing specifics in a Gem, not in every prompt.
Instead of
Write a blog post about travel in India.
Perplexity version
### THE BRIEF ### Write a 1200-word travel blog post titled "A 3-Day Cultural Deep Dive into Hyderabad for First-Time Visitors". **Reader:** has never been to Hyderabad, planning a long weekend, choosing between this and three other Indian cities. **Tone:** enthusiastic and informative. Not a brochure. ### STRUCTURE ### 1. **Day 1 - the Old City:** Charminar, Laad Bazaar, Chowmahalla Palace. 2. **Day 2 - the Nizams' era:** Salar Jung Museum, Golconda Fort with the evening light and sound show. 3. **Day 3 - modern Hyderabad:** Hi-Tech City, and biryani somewhere well known such as Paradise. Per day: a short paragraph on its character, then each stop with roughly how long to spend, what to look at while there, and one specific detail a first-timer would walk past. ### MUST HOLD ### * Each day works as a route, in an order that makes geographic sense. * Practical specifics: which parts of the city the metro reaches, when an auto or cab is better, and which months are genuinely too hot - name them. * Concrete over evocative. "Charminar at 7am before the shops open" earns its place; "bathed in golden light" does not. ### USE GOOGLE SEARCH FOR THE PERISHABLE FACTS ### This is the part that makes the post usable rather than plausible. Ground and cite each of these: * Current opening days and hours for Chowmahalla Palace, Salar Jung Museum and Golconda Fort. * Current ticket prices for Indian nationals and for foreign visitors. * Whether the Golconda light and sound show is currently running, its timings, and which language on which evening. * Which metro line serves which of these areas and the nearest station to each. For each, give me the link and **the date the page was last updated**. Museum pages go stale and a citation only tells me where a claim came from, not that it is current. Where you cannot find a current source, write "check before you go" in the post rather than stating a figure. ### IF I HAVE ATTACHED PHOTOGRAPHS ### Use my own photographs of these places as the source for the physical description. A detail from a real photograph is worth more than a recalled one, and it is a kind of specificity no wording can supply. ### OUTPUT ### A Google Doc called "Hyderabad 3-day post", with every grounded fact followed by its source link so I can check them before publishing. Save the reader profile and tone rules as a Gem called "Travel blog voice".
Instead of
Analyze my sales data.
Perplexity version
### THE SETUP ### Act as a senior data analyst. I am **attaching my last quarter's sales data as a Google Sheet** rather than pasting a CSV - work directly from that file. If I have attached it, do not ask me to paste anything. **Before you compute anything:** tell me what columns you found, what you understand each to contain, and the number of rows. If a column is ambiguous or inconsistently formatted, stop and ask. A large attached file makes it easy to produce a confident analysis of the wrong column, and the attachment does not remove my obligation to be precise about the question. ### TASKS - IN ORDER ### 1. **Total revenue for the quarter.** The figure, and the row count it came from. 2. **Top 5 products by units sold** - a table with product, units, revenue, share of total revenue. Flag any case where the top seller by units is not the top by revenue. 3. **Week-by-week trend** - a table, then one paragraph: rising, falling or flat, and whether it is a trend or noise at this sample size. 4. **One-paragraph recommendation** on which category to focus marketing on next quarter, citing the specific figures from 1 to 3. ### MUST HOLD ### * Every figure traceable to the attached file. **Do not search.** No industry benchmarks, no "typical for the sector" comparisons - grounding is the specific way an analysis of my data starts containing things that are not in my data. * Show the arithmetic for the totals. ### OUTPUT - THIS IS WHERE THE PLATFORM EARNS ITS PLACE ### Write the analysis back into the same Sheet as a new tab called "Q analysis", and build it with **live formulas referring to the data tab**, not typed-in numbers. I want to change one row and watch the totals update. A table of static figures is a screenshot; a formula is a tool. Add a second tab, "Charts", with the weekly trend as a line chart and the top five products as a bar chart. Then in the chat: what this data cannot answer - one quarter with no prior period means seasonality is invisible - and which fields I should start capturing to make next quarter's analysis better.
Instead of
Create an image of a woman working.
Perplexity version
### THE COMMISSION ### Generate a vibrant, photorealistic image. **Subject:** a young Indian woman in her late twenties, a software developer, sitting at a desk typing on a laptop. Smiling confidently - at her work, not at the camera. **Setting:** a modern, brightly lit office in Hyderabad's Hi-Tech City. Large windows behind her with a city view. Colleagues visible but out of focus in the background. **Clothing:** stylish professional Indian attire - a smart kurti with trousers. **Camera:** mid-shot, slightly to one side, as if someone glanced across from the next desk. Shallow depth of field - she is sharp, the background soft. Natural daylight from the windows as the key light. ### ORDER MATTERS ### Subject first, then setting, then camera - and each on its own line. A single paragraph carrying twelve visual details loses the ones at the end, so anything non-negotiable belongs in the first two lines. ### IF I HAVE ATTACHED A REFERENCE IMAGE ### This is the specificity that no amount of wording matches, and it is the reason to do this example here. If I have attached a photograph - of our actual office, of the Hi-Tech City skyline, of the kind of workspace I mean - use it as the visual reference for the setting and the light, and tell me which elements of it you have carried into the image and which you could not. A photograph of the real thing removes more guesses than a paragraph of adjectives. ### THEN ### 1. Generate it. 2. Give me three variants of the prompt - one changing the setting, one the composition, one the mood - so I have somewhere to go if this is close but wrong. 3. Tell me what in my brief you could not render faithfully. Hands on a keyboard, and text on screens or signage, come out wrong routinely - say whether this attempt has that problem rather than leaving me to spot it. ### ITERATE, DO NOT REWRITE ### I will come back with one change at a time - "same image, she is looking at a second monitor" - and I want it treated as an edit of this image rather than a fresh generation. Starting over gives me a different woman in a different office and loses whatever was already working. ### ONE MORE SPECIFIC ### This is for a blog header, so leave clear space on the left for a headline to sit over. Tell me if that constrains the composition you would otherwise have chosen - what the image is for changes the crop more than any detail in the description.