Practical tips and summary of the basics course

📄 Section 5: Practical tips that make a difference

Here are the last good habits before you move to the advanced course.

Dialogue and uncertainty

• End with a follow-up question (“Do you need X to answer confidently?”) – reduces guessing and surfaces hidden assumptions.
• Write what should happen if the answer is missing – e.g. ask clarifying questions, or refer to a channel/policy.

Context, steps, and reasoning

• Context: who the response is for, what has already happened, the goal of the task.
• Break up large tasks: Step 1 … Step 2 … so everything doesn’t end up as one unstructured blob.
• Reason out loud for complex questions: ask the model to show its reasoning before the conclusion (more on that in the advanced course).

Structure and meta-help

• Use clear headings in the prompt: BACKGROUND, TASK, IMPORTANT, FORMAT – the model follows structure more easily.
• Mark priorities with words like IMPORTANT/CRITICAL or bold where warranted (no guarantee, but often helpful).
• Stuck? Let a chat review your prompt or suggest a v2 based on what went wrong.

Summary of the basics course

Congratulations – you’ve completed the Prompting Course: Basics.

You can now:

• Build clear instructions with WHAT–WHY–HOW–WHO–TONE
• Reinforce with realistic examples
• Test and refine methodically
• Use practical habits for safer and more useful assistants

Want to go deeper? Move on to the advanced course on context engineering, advanced structure, reasoning techniques, and RAG from a prompting perspective.

Good luck with your prompting!

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