LESSON 2 OF 6
Give it your own material
BY THE END OF THIS LESSON
Get a specific answer by supplying the source instead of describing it.
Describing a document is not the same as giving it
A summary of your material is lossy, and the parts you leave out are usually the parts that make the answer specific. "We had a call about renewals and they seemed unsure" throws away the sentence where they actually said why.
Paste the transcript. Attach the report. The model cannot invent a number you handed it, and it cannot miss a detail you did not summarise away.
Say what to do with it
Attaching a file and asking "thoughts?" gets you a summary, which you did not need — you had the document.
The instruction is the valuable half. Ask for the thing you would otherwise do by hand: the three objections in this call, the clauses that differ from our standard terms, the figures that contradict each other.
Make the answer checkable
With a long document, always require it to say where each point came from — the section, the page, the speaker.
This turns a five-minute verification into a five-second one. It also makes fabrication harder: an invented claim has no location to point at, and asking for one surfaces the gap rather than hiding it.
WORKED EXAMPLE
DESCRIBING IT
We got a customer complaint about onboarding being confusing. Write a reply.
SUPPLYING IT
[pastes the full complaint email] Write a reply. Quote their own words for the two specific problems they raised, so it is obvious we read it. Do not apologise more than once. Offer the one thing we can actually do this week: a 15-minute setup call.
The first prompt produces a reply to a generic complaint, because a generic complaint is all it was given. The second can name the specific things this person said — which is the entire difference between a reply that lands and one that reads as a template.
YOUR TURN
Turn a document you already have into an answer you would otherwise write by hand.
RUN THIS
I am attaching [a call transcript / a report / a long email thread]. Do not summarise it. Instead: list the decisions that were actually made, the questions left open, and anything stated as fact that I should verify before repeating it. For each item, say where in the document it came from.
What a good result looks like
Every line should be traceable to a place in your document. If something has no location, treat it as the model filling a gap — which is precisely what asking for locations is designed to expose.
KNOWLEDGE CHECK
Answer all 3 correctly to complete this lesson.
1. Why supply the document rather than describe what is in it?
2. You attach a 40-page report and ask "thoughts?". What is wrong with that?
3. What does asking "where did each point come from" actually buy you?
REMEMBER THIS
Supply the source, say what to do with it, and require a location for every claim.