LESSON 2 OF 5
Show it, do not describe it
BY THE END OF THIS LESSON
Use examples to communicate a standard you cannot put into words.
Some things cannot be described
Try writing instructions that fully capture your tone of voice. You will end up with adjectives — "warm but direct, confident without arrogance" — that could describe a thousand different writers.
Two examples of your actual writing communicate it instantly and exactly. This is the single biggest upgrade most intermediate users are missing.
How to give examples well
Two to three is the sweet spot. One reads as a template to copy; five starts to dilute.
Make them structurally identical. Same shape, same length, same kind of input. Variation in shape teaches the wrong lesson.
Include a hard case. If every example is easy, you have not shown it what to do when the input is awkward.
Label them. Mark the input and output clearly so it knows which part it is meant to produce.
Negative examples
You can also show what you do not want, and it is powerful — but only when paired with the corrected version. "Not this: [X]. This instead: [Y]." A rejected example alone leaves it guessing which property you objected to.
WORKED EXAMPLE
DESCRIBING THE TONE
Write in our brand voice: friendly, professional, approachable but authoritative, and never salesy.
SHOWING THE TONE
Match the voice in these two examples. INPUT: server outage OUTPUT: "We were down for 43 minutes this morning. A database migration went wrong and our failover did not trigger. Here is what we have changed so it cannot happen the same way twice." INPUT: price increase OUTPUT: "Prices go up 8% in March — the first rise in three years. Your current rate holds until renewal. If that changes things for you, reply and we will talk." Now write one for: delayed feature launch.
The adjectives in the first version fit almost any brand. The two examples pin down sentence length, the habit of leading with the fact, the absence of apology-padding, and the direct address — none of which the adjective list captured.
YOUR TURN
Turn your own past work into a reusable style example.
RUN THIS
I am going to paste two things I wrote that I was happy with. Do not compliment them. Instead, reverse-engineer the rules: sentence length, how I open, what I avoid, how formal I am, how I handle bad news. Give me the result as a short style guide I can paste above future prompts, plus the two examples formatted as INPUT/OUTPUT pairs. Here they are: [paste two pieces]
What a good result looks like
The rules should surprise you slightly — good analysis catches habits you did not know you had.
KNOWLEDGE CHECK
Answer all 2 correctly to complete this lesson.
1. How many examples usually work best?
2. Why pair a negative example with a corrected version?
REMEMBER THIS
When you cannot describe the standard, show two examples of it.