How to Prompt Claude: The Basics That Actually Help

Most of what gets sold as "prompt engineering" is noise. You do not need a library of magic phrases, and telling Claude it is a world-class expert does almost nothing. After a lot of hours with it, the difference between a weak answer and a great one comes down to three plain things, and none of them is a trick.

This is the third post in a beginner's series on Claude. The first one mapped out what Claude can do. This one is about the single skill that makes everything else work better: how to actually talk to it.

Stop Querying, Start Briefing

The habit most people bring from search engines is the shortest possible query. You type three keywords into Google because Google wants keywords. Claude is the opposite. It does its best work when you talk to it the way you would brief a capable colleague who just walked in and knows nothing about your situation.

That colleague would ask you three things before starting. What is this for. What do you want back. What do I need to know that I cannot see. A good prompt just answers those upfront so nobody has to ask.

The Three Things That Actually Move the Needle

The first is context. Not "write me a marketing email" but "write me a marketing email to existing customers who bought our starter plan a year ago and have not upgraded, from me, the founder, in a warm and direct voice." Every extra piece of real context removes a guess Claude would otherwise make, and guesses are where bad answers come from.

The second is the role and the goal. Tell it who it is writing for and what the output is supposed to achieve. "Explain this to a client who is not technical and is nervous about cost" produces a completely different, better answer than "explain this."

The third is format. If you want a table, ask for a table. If you want five bullet points and nothing else, say five bullet points and nothing else. If you want it under a hundred words, say so. Claude will match a clear format almost every time, and this alone fixes half of what people complain about.

Show It What Good Looks Like

The strongest single move is an example. If you have a piece of writing whose style you like, paste it and say "match this voice." If you filled out one form correctly and have twenty more to go, show the finished one and let Claude follow the pattern. One good example teaches it more than three paragraphs of instructions, because you are showing instead of describing.

Fix It in the Same Chat, Do Not Start Over

When the first answer is not right, people tend to open a new chat and rewrite the whole prompt. Do not. Just tell it what to change, the way you would with a person. "Shorter." "Too formal, loosen it up." "You missed the part about the deadline." It keeps everything from the conversation and adjusts. Half of good prompting is really just good editing, out loud, in the same thread.

The Wall You Will Hit

At some point better wording stops helping. You tighten the prompt, you add role and format, and the answer is still mediocre. That is the wall, and it is not a prompting problem. It usually means one of two things.

Either Claude does not have the information it needs, in which case no phrasing will save it and you have to actually give it the document, the numbers, or the background. Or the task is too big for one shot, in which case you break it into steps and do them one at a time. When you feel yourself fighting the wording, stop rewording and ask instead: does it have what it needs, and is this one task or five.

What Not to Bother With

You do not need to tell Claude it is an expert, a genius, or a senior anything. You do not need to promise it a tip or threaten it. You do not need long preambles about how important this is. Those were folk remedies from older, weaker models, and on current Claude they mostly waste space. Clear context beats theatrical framing every time.

Where to Start This Week

Take a request you would normally type as a short query and rewrite it as a briefing. Add who it is for, what you want back, and one piece of context Claude cannot see. Then, when the answer comes, do not restart, just edit it in plain words until it is right.

Good prompting is not a secret language. It is the ordinary skill of explaining what you want to someone competent who cannot read your mind. If you want to build that skill properly, our free StudioMeyer Academy has a whole track on it. Next in this series, we look at why Claude sometimes answers with total confidence and is completely wrong, and how to catch it.