The 12-Point Prompt Checklist to Run Before You Send Any AI Output

Ask for "a summary of this report" and you will get one. Even, polite, and useless. Nothing in it is exactly wrong; nothing in it helps either. The same thing happens with rewrites, plans and replies: you get something shaped like an answer that you then have to rebuild by hand.

The gap between a draft you can work with and one you throw away is usually measured in seconds, not talent. Twelve decisions, made before you send the request and again before the result leaves your hands, cover almost all of it.

Why the Setup Costs Less Than the Cleanup

Every loose request pushes the guesswork downstream. The assistant fills the blanks with a generic structure, a neutral tone and examples pulled from nowhere in particular. You then spend your afternoon cutting, re-asking and cutting again.

Ninety seconds of preparation inverts that. You decide what the answer should look like before a single word of it exists, and you keep the judgment calls where they belong: with you.

Points 1–3: Frame the Job

1. Assign a role with a reason. "You are an expert" tells nobody anything. "You are a technical editor rewriting dense engineering notes for non-technical managers" tells the assistant which vocabulary to keep and which to drop. The role should describe the work, not inflate it.

2. Name the reader. Who opens this? A new customer, a skeptical finance lead, your own team on a Monday morning. Say what they already know and what you want them to do after reading. A paragraph written for a beginner and a paragraph written for a specialist are not the same paragraph.

3. State the job in one verb. Summarize. Rewrite. Compare. Critique. Draft. Shorten. Choose one primary action per request. When you need three things at once, number them — mixed jobs produce muddled output, and you will not be able to tell which part failed.

Points 4–6: Hand Over the Material

4. Paste the source, not a link. If the material is a document, put the text in the message. Links may not be opened, and instructions about a file that was never read produce confident fiction. The same goes for tables and figures: include them, or say plainly that they are missing.

5. Define the words that drift. "Churn", "active user", "urgent" and "short" mean different things in different teams. One line fixes it: here, "short" means under 120 words. That single sentence removes an entire class of edits later.

6. Say what to ignore. The appendix, the marketing boilerplate, last year's prices, the section you already rewrote. Explicit exclusions keep the useful material in focus, especially when you are pasting in a long document and only need part of it.

Points 7–9: Shape the Output

7. Specify the shape. A table with three columns? Five bullets, each under fifteen words? A 200-word opening followed by an action list? Describe the structure, not just the subject. Structure is the part people forget, and it is the part that costs the most to fix by hand.

8. Fix length and register. Give a word or item count, and a tone. "Plain English, second person, no exclamation marks, British spelling" prevents a rewrite that has nothing to do with the content.

9. Add hard limits and an escape route. Tell it what not to do — don't invent figures, don't guess dates, don't pad the ending with a summary of the summary. Then give it somewhere to go when information is missing: if the source doesn't contain the number, write [CHECK] instead of estimating. That one instruction converts silent errors into visible gaps, and it is worth more than any amount of polishing afterwards.

Points 10–12: Verify Before It Leaves Your Hands

Nothing goes out with your name on it until you have done three passes. They take a few minutes and they are not optional.

10. Trace every fact, figure, name and date. Open the source and check each one. Numbers drift, names get spelled two ways, a date can shift by a month without anyone noticing. If something cannot be traced to the original material, cut it or flag it. Where the content touches health, money or legal questions, treat the draft as a first pass and have a qualified professional review it before it goes anywhere.

11. Read it aloud, then claim it. If a sentence isn't something you would say in a meeting, rewrite it. You are the author of record now, and "the draft said so" has never convinced anyone.

12. Sweep for exposure. Client names, internal costs, personal details, half-formed opinions, a stray remark about a colleague. Confidential material has a habit of surviving in the middle of an otherwise clean document. Check before you copy, and check again before you paste.

The Twelve Points on One Screen

1. Role, with a reason.
2. Reader, and what they need.
3. One primary verb.
4. Source pasted in full.
5. Terms defined.
6. Exclusions listed.
7. Output shape described.
8. Length and register fixed.
9. Hard limits, plus a [CHECK] fallback.
10. Every fact traced to source.
11. Voice read aloud and owned.
12. Sensitive details removed.

Make It a Habit

Keep the list somewhere you will actually see it — a note file, a sticky note, the top of your task list. For the first week, write four shorthand lines before each request: Job / Material / Shape / Limits. Points one through three feed the first line, four through six the second, seven through nine the third. Verification is the fourth, and it happens after the draft comes back.

Here is what that looks like in practice, once the twelve points are compressed:

You are a technical editor writing for non-technical managers. Job: rewrite the notes below into a 250-word summary plus five action bullets. Ignore the appendix and the pricing section. If a number isn't in the notes, write [CHECK]. Plain English, second person, no exclamation marks.

Notice how much of it is about restraint. What to leave out, what not to invent, how short to stay. Good requests are mostly boundaries.

The last step is the one people skip when they are busy, and it is the step that protects them. Two extra minutes on points ten through twelve will save you a correction email, a reissued document, or a conversation you would rather not have. Build the habit while the stakes are low, and it will be there when they aren't.

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