Prompting That Actually Works: the six moves past "act as an expert"

"Act as a world-class expert copywriter" does nothing. It was useful in 2023. Current models already know what good copy looks like, and telling one to be an expert is like telling a surgeon to try hard.

What still moves quality is structure.

Wrap your instructions in tags so the model can tell your commands from the text you pasted in,
Show it three examples instead of three adjectives, because rhythm cannot be described and can be demonstrated,
Ask for reasoning BEFORE the answer, not after, or you are just asking it to defend a guess,
Prefill the first tokens of the reply and formatting problems disappear,
Split the mega-prompt into a chain where each step has one job,
Put a rule in the prompt that can actually be failed 🔥

Wrote the whole thing up. Twelve before-and-after prompt pairs, a full tagged prompt you can copy the shape of, and a three-step chain that works.

Free. No email wall.

Comment "TAGS" 👇 and I'll send it to your DMs.