Practice12 min read

Your First Great Prompt

The difference between a bad prompt and a great one

Here's a secret: most people get mediocre results from AI because they write mediocre prompts. Not because they're bad at it — because nobody taught them the basics.

Compare these two prompts:

Vague prompt: "Write me an email."

Clear prompt: "Write a professional email to my team announcing that our project deadline has moved from Friday to next Wednesday. Keep the tone positive and mention that this gives us time to improve the quality of our deliverables. The team is 5 people in a marketing department."

The second prompt gives AI the context it needs to produce something useful on the first try.

The RICE Framework

Great prompts have four ingredients. Remember RICE:

Role — Tell the AI who it should be ("You are an experienced project manager")

Instruction — State clearly what you want ("Write a status update email")

Context — Provide the relevant details ("The project is 2 weeks behind schedule because...")

Expectations — Define the output format ("Keep it under 200 words, use bullet points")

You don't need all four every time, but the more you include, the better your results.

Start with Instruction and Context. These two alone will dramatically improve your results. Add Role and Expectations as you get more comfortable.

Practice Exercise

Your manager just asked you to send a quick email to a client (Sarah at TechCorp) letting them know that the quarterly report will be delivered by end of day Friday instead of Thursday as originally planned. The delay is because the design team needed an extra day for the visualizations. Write a prompt that would get an AI to draft this email for you.

Interactive prompt practice is coming in a future update! For now, try writing your prompt in your favorite AI tool, then reveal the model answer below to compare.