Claude
The careful reader — long documents, precise editing, honest about what it doesn't know.
Best for
- long documents
- editing that keeps your voice
- thinking through trade-offs
- pulling structure out of mess
Signature move
Paste the source, then ask what changed and why.
How it wants to be spoken to
Separate the material from the request: paste the document, then say what to do with it.
Tell it the audience and what “good” means for this piece.
Ask for brevity up front — left alone it is thorough to a fault.
Show one example of the voice you want; it copies tone better than adjectives.
Why it glitches
None of this is you doing it wrong. These are the shapes it reliably falls into — and the fix beside each.
Buries the answer under a warm-up → “answer first, then at most three sentences of context”.
Over-hedges when the ask is vague → give it a default to take.
Rewrites too much when editing → “change only the sentences I marked; leave everything else exactly as written”.
Reads a pasted document as instructions if it looks like an order → put your instruction after the document, clearly separated.
A prompt that works there
Here is a document and what I need from it. DOCUMENT: [paste] WHAT I NEED: [task] RULES: Answer first. Then the shortest explanation that helps. If the document doesn't contain the answer, say so instead of inferring.
Bring Tay your actual task and she'll shape it for Claude.
Practice with Tay