7 Prompting Techniques to Improve Your ChatGPT Responses

 Follow these techniques to use ChatGPT like a pro and get precise responses.

ChatGPT is an incredibly powerful tool that can produce stunning, human-like responses to your questions and prompts. But did you know that there are techniques that can get more precise and relevant answers to your prompts?

Just by adding a few provisos or setting some scenarios, ChatGPT can produce more tailored answers to your queries. Let’s look at some of the ways you can improve the quality of your ChatGPT responses.

 1. Assign a Role

One way to get the best results from ChatGPT is to assign it a role. This is a fantastic method of getting more appropriate responses to your prompts. Asking ChatGPT a question will always produce a response of some sort, but its relevance might not be suited to your requirements.

This can be easily remedied by framing your question within a role. For example, we asked ChatGPT this question—“Can you explain the workings of the sun?”

In the first instance, we asked this question without assigning a role:

The answer goes into some detail about atomic nuclei and the process of fusion. But what if your target audience was a class full of five-year-olds? This is where assigning a role can help. Let’s try it again and this time assign it the role of a teacher.

The technique is simple, start by assigning a role. In this case, we told ChatGPT to assume the role of a primary school teacher.

As you can see, this is a far more suitable response for a class of young kids. This is one example of how assigning a role to ChatGPT can improve the relevance of its response.

There are plenty of examples of where assigning a role can help produce more tailored responses. For instance, you can tell ChatGPT to assume such roles as a travel guide, Linux terminal, movie critic, and English translator, among many others. You can even tell it to be a fictional character.

The only limit is your imagination, and it's a fun thing to try too.

2. Define Your Communication Channel and Target Audience

If you are looking for ChatGPT to produce some creative writing, then you can achieve far more impressive results by giving it relevant information. In this instance, you can refine the output by supplying information about the intended use of the output and some demographics of the target audience.

For example, imagine you are creating a YouTube script about the equipment you would need to start a needlework hobby. We began by prompting it with a simple question—"What equipment do I need to start a needlework hobby?”

The response was a numbered list of seven items you would need to get started. This is fine, but it isn’t going to set YouTube alight. Now, we refined the prompt to cover the output type and the main target audience.

The generated response was much more precisely tailored to suit the required output.

3. Chained Prompts

ChatGPT will quite happily write a page of content for your website if so prompted. However, there are some drawbacks to simply prompting it to “write a page for my website”. Firstly, there are limits to the length of response that ChatGPT can output. This means you might not get a full response.

But chained prompts allow you to tailor the content to ensure that it matches your needs with specific information and keywords. To show how effective this can be, we started by prompting it to write the homepage content for a pest control website.

The response is some fairly generic text that is reasonably well-written but isn’t entirely suitable as homepage content. But by using chained prompts you can improve the results. We started by asking for homepage headings for a pest control company in Michigan:

Now, we can chain our prompts to generate content for each heading. In this case, we asked for a short paragraph and three bullet points, and we also asked for the inclusion of some keywords. As you can see the response remembered that the content was for a Michigan-based company.

Using the chaining technique allows you to precisely tailor responses for more relevant results.

4. Format Your Output in Markdown

Unless instructed to do otherwise, ChatGPT responses are generated in plain text. However, it can also handle the markup language called markdown, and if requested it will produce the requested output in this format.

Markdown is an incredibly popular and powerful language for creating web-ready content.

As an example, we asked ChatGPT to write a short blog post about the four inner planets in the solar system. First, we did it without any formatting.

Next, we reframed the question to output the result in markdown language and to include headings and a table summarizing some of the information:

The output included a heading and subheading for each planet as we requested.

It also included the requested table in the conclusion.

This is a powerful way to get better-formatted output, it also works well when used in conjunction with chained prompts.

5. Use ChatGPT to Generate Its Own Prompts

The AI that underlies ChatGPT is incredibly powerful. So powerful, that with a few instructions, it can generate its own prompts and offer you a choice of routes for your research to go down.

In this instance, we started by inputting the following prompt:

ChatGPT then asked us for more detail about the purpose of the prompts. Obviously, the more detail you provide here, the more accurate the response will be. But for the sake of brevity, we kept it short and sweet.

Once ChatGPT has created relevant prompts, you can use the prompt simply by referring to its number:

6. Let Your Personality Shine by Adding Some Character to the Response

There is no doubt that ChatGPT responds with human-like answers. But if you were stuck on a six-hour plane flight with a human that responded like ChatGPT’s default replies, you’d soon be bored to tears.

However, with a few tweaks to your prompts, you can generate answers with a little more personality. The example below compares a standard answer with one that includes a little bit of injected personality.

We asked ChatGPT to write one hundred words on the dry subject of fiscal procurement:

Well done if you managed to stay awake when reading the response. Let’s see if we can spice it up a bit. This time we asked it to write it in a lighthearted manner and include some dry humor.

Now, while it may not have your audience rolling on the floor in laughter, it is a far more interesting reply than the previous one.

7. Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting could be likened to a student in an exam showing their workings. It involves starting with a seed question or idea and then using the model's responses to further refine and develop the topic.

For instance, if we ask ChatGPT a simple question with a numeric answer we get this response. The first question is the seed question and lays out to ChatGPT the format of the response we expect.

Now we can repeat the process and add some detail to the seed question:

As you can see, ChatGPT will respond and show the chain of thought that generated the correct answer.

Using Prompt Techniques to Improve the Response From ChatGPT

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are incredibly powerful even without these prompting techniques. But with a few simple tips and tricks, you can take the responses you get from ChatGPT to the next level.

Learning a few prompting tricks allows you to unlock the full potential of this language model by generating fresh and unique content that is tailored to resonate with your target audience.