Intermediate
Prompting in Practice: From Good to Great
Bridge the gap between basic prompting and advanced prompt engineering with practical techniques for real work — written output, research, documents, templates, and more.
01
The Intermediate Mindset: Directing vs. Asking
The single mental shift that separates intermediate prompters from beginners — and a practical framework for applying it immediately to your real work.
›
02
Multi-Turn Conversations as a Design Strategy
How to treat a conversation with AI as a design medium rather than a query session — three structural patterns for building context progressively and getting compound results.
›
03
Custom Instructions and Persistent Prompts
How ChatGPT Custom Instructions, Claude Projects, and Gemini Gems each work — and a practical framework for deciding what belongs in persistent settings versus per-session prompts.
›
04
Specificity Calibration
The prompting sweet spot between too vague and too constrained — a practical framework for calibrating how much specificity any task actually needs.
›
05
Prompting for Written Work
A practical briefing framework for the written tasks people actually do most — emails, reports, and proposals — with before/after examples for each.
›
06
Prompting with Documents and Existing Content
Four techniques for getting better results when your prompt includes pasted documents, reference text, or existing content — including context placement, evidence requests, and citation habits.
›
07
Prompting for Research and Analysis
The difference between research prompts and retrieval prompts — and four structured analysis frameworks that produce sharper, more useful outputs.
›
08
Negative Space: What Not to Say
Why negative constraints often work better than positive instructions — and a practical library of the ones that produce the most reliable results.
›
09
Reading Output Like a Detective
Six specific signals in AI output that indicate problems — hallucination tells, hedging tells, requirement drops — and a one-minute review protocol for catching them before you act.
›
10
Combining Techniques
How to layer role, context, constraints, and format into a single compound prompt — with a worked example building from bare request to production-ready brief.
›
11
Prompt Templates and Variable Substitution
How to turn a one-off prompt into a reusable template using variable placeholders — with a practical workflow for building and maintaining a prompt library that saves hours every week.
›
12
Model Awareness: Same Prompt, Different Results
The documented default behavior differences between Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini — and how to adapt the same prompt to get the best from each model.
›
13
Prompting for Creative and Open-Ended Tasks
Why creative prompting requires a different calibration than analytical prompting — and the specific techniques that unlock genuinely unexpected, useful creative output.
›
14
The Revision Habit
The capstone lesson: how to build a systematic revision practice that compounds your prompting skill over time — a prompt log habit, a diagnosis framework, and the intermediate promise.
›