Content sourced from official Anthropic documentation
1
The golden rule of clear prompting
Show your prompt to a colleague — ideally someone who has minimal context on the task — and ask them to follow the instructions. If they're confused, Claude will likely be too. Think of Claude as a brilliant but very new employee (with amnesia) who needs explicit instructions.
💡The more precisely you explain what you want, the better Claude's response will be.
2
Give Claude contextual information
Just like you might perform better on a task with more context, Claude will too. Provide: what the task results will be used for, what audience the output is meant for, what workflow the task is part of, and what a successful task completion looks like.
3
Be specific about what you want
If you want Claude to output only code and nothing else, say so. If you want a specific format, length, style, or structure — state it explicitly.
Marketing email
Your task is to craft a targeted marketing email for our Q3 AcmeCloud feature release.
Instructions:
1. Write for this target audience: Mid-size tech companies (100-500 employees) upgrading from on-prem to cloud.
2. Highlight 3 key new features: advanced data encryption, cross-platform sync, and real-time collaboration.
3. Tone: Professional yet approachable. Emphasize security, efficiency, and teamwork.
4. Include a clear CTA: Free 30-day trial with priority onboarding.
5. Subject line: Under 50 chars, mention "security" and "collaboration".
6. Personalization: Use {{COMPANY_NAME}} and {{CONTACT_NAME}} variables.
Structure:
1. Subject line
2. Email body (150-200 words)
3. CTA button text
The vague prompt makes Claude guess the audience, features, and tone. The specific prompt eliminates all guesswork.
4
Provide instructions as sequential steps
Use numbered lists or bullet points to ensure Claude carries out the task exactly as you want.
Anonymizing customer data
Your task is to anonymize customer feedback for our quarterly review.
Instructions:
1. Replace all customer names with "CUSTOMER_[ID]" (e.g., "Jane Doe" → "CUSTOMER_001").
2. Replace email addresses with "EMAIL_[ID]@example.com".
3. Redact phone numbers as "PHONE_[ID]".
4. If a message mentions a specific product (e.g., "AcmeCloud"), leave it intact.
5. If no PII is found, copy the message verbatim.
6. Output only the processed messages, separated by "---".
Data to process: {{FEEDBACK_DATA}}
Without steps, Claude still makes mistakes like leaving in a customer's name. The sequential instructions ensure consistent, complete anonymization.
5
Control output format explicitly
Tell Claude exactly how verbose or terse you want the output. Specifying format transforms verbose narratives into scannable, actionable lists.
Incident report analysis
Analyze this AcmeCloud outage report. Skip the preamble. Keep your response terse and write only the bare bones necessary information. List only:
1) Cause
2) Duration
3) Impacted services
4) Number of affected users
5) Estimated revenue loss.
Here's the report: {{REPORT}}
The vague prompt produces a paragraph of narrative. The specific prompt gets: '1) Cause: Misconfigured load balancer 2) Duration: 4h 37m 3) Impacted: Core sync, admin dashboard 4) Users: 1.3M 5) Loss: $420,000'
