ChatGPT (and other Chatbot) Tips -- Not Just for Writers

Reusing prompts made much easier

In my latest book, AI Prompting Field Guide for Writers, there are a number of tips that aren’t just for writers.

Here’s an excerpt that will help you get more Chatbot experience:

Use Named Placeholders

If you have some favorite prompts you want to remember, here’s a tip that works for ChatGPT (it may or may not work for other Chatbots; you’ll have to try it). It can also help you if you want to run the same prompt for multiple inputs. Imagine you want to research a lot of people. You can write a prompt:

What do you know about [person]?
person="John W. Campbell"

You’ll get a nice sketch of Campbell in response. Now suppose you want to look up someone else. In the same session, just write:

person="Theodore Sturgeon"

Use Prompt Variables for Repetition

Sure, for a simple prompt like the last one, that’s not a big deal. But for a long prompt or one with lots of placeholders, it can really be a time saver. Especially if you save your common prompts in a file so you can just paste them in and then add or edit the placeholders.

For a more realistic example, consider this:

In the year [year] identify [number] interesting events that happened related to [topic].

topic="Manned space flight"
year=1969
number=3

You don’t have to use brackets, ChatGPT will figure it out if you want to use curly braces or some other character.

This works really well if the prompt has the same placeholder in a lot of places. For example:

You are an expert in [topic]. I am interested in [number] news stories surrounding [topic] from [year]. If you can't find [number] of stories in [year], you can draw from the year after.

Put your common prompts in a document so you can just cut/paste/edit the variables and off you go!

Want more tips and a ton of prompt? Get the book.