Quick and simple prompts for getting things done
Making short work of text functions you need to do while reseraching and writing
Introduction
The following are simple prompts that I use in some form every day while writing and researching. I include a bonus tip at the end if you’re hankering for more complete prompting tips.
Let’s get started. These 15 simple (microtask) prompts are quick to enter for quick results. While these tasks typically do not result in errors, it's still advisable to review them carefully. An LLM will attempt to do what you ask. If you accidentally type a wrong word or two in the prompt, the results will be different from what you ‘thought’ you wanted. This happens to me when I’m typing fast and not thinking carefully about the sentence structure (for the prompt).
Feel free to copy/paste the text functions into whatever tool you use to save them as a reference or bookmark this page for future reference.
I want to emphasize that you can vary these prompts as you see fit and I encourage you to do that to gain a more nuanced understanding of how the LLM you are using responds. I encourage you to practice the art of crafting prompts that fit your needs and to keep looking around for inspiration for new ways to prompt.
Think of prompting as getting to know your assistant on a more ‘personal’ level. You know, the clearer you are with your communication, the better the results. I also suggest running the same prompt on a different LLM, especially if you’re not satisfied with the response you are getting. Don’t worry, your assistant will not be jealous. I use ChatGPT4 quite often but I find myself cross-checking some results with Bard.google.com, perplexity.ai, and/or Claude.ai. I typically have a ChatGPT4 (or Bard.google.com) browser tab always open for quick tasks like this. Why open it up over and over when there is no harm in keeping a tab ready to go at a moment’s notice?
Examples of quick and simple text function prompts
Here is how I would use these simple functions in a prompt format.
Prompt format name:
Short description of the task[your text here] - you can remove the brackets
1. Text summarization: Provides a shortened version of a text while still preserving its main ideas and concepts.
Summarize and shorten the following text while preserving its main idea and concept.
[your text here]
2. Text correction: This helps you correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors in your text.
Correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors in the following text:
[your text here]
3. Text formatting: This helps you format text into a specific style or structure, such as bullet points or numbered lists.
Format the following text as a numbered list.
[your text here]
4. Text paraphrasing: Rephrases your text to express the same ideas in different words.
Rewrite the following text to express the same ideas in different words.
[your text here]
5. Text formalization: Converts text into a standardized form, such as lowercasing all letters or removing extra spaces.
Convert the following text into all lowercasing — OPTIONALLY (or upper case) (or convert the text to lowercase, then capitalize the first letter of every word.)
[your text here]
.
6. Text alignment: Align text to a specific width or format it into columns.
Align the following text to 65 characters wide. Do not break words.
[your text here]
The rest of these prompts have some additional comments by me. I think you have the format by now.
7. Text translation: Translate text from one language to another. English to Spanish, German to English, etc.
8. Text entity recognition: Identify and extract entities such as names, locations, and organizations from a text (or text file). This is particularly useful with a large text or CSV file you uploaded to the LLM. Have your prompt request a list of all the things you want to have the LLM pull out for you. Remember you can include a request in the prompt to format the list into a table. You can combine requests into a single prompt.
9. Text sentiment analysis: Determine the emotional tone of a text, such as whether it is positive, negative, or neutral. Just drop a text file or CSV file and include your request in the prompt to identify the nature of the tone in the text.
10. Text comparison: Compare two or more texts and identify similarities and differences between them. I find this particular handy. You can upload two files and have the LLM compare the two files. In many cases your LLM will allow up to 5 text files provided they are not too large.
11. Text spell check: Detect and correct spelling mistakes in a text. I use this a lot as a cross-check in my writing process.
12. Text compression: Reduce the size of a text by removing redundant information or encoding it more efficiently. For example:
"The fox jumped over the lazy dog. The dog was not amused by the fox's actions. The fox just smiled and walked away."
Compressed version - removed the duplicate use of FOX and replaced FOX with ‘it’.
"The fox jumped over the lazy dog. It was not amused by its actions. The fox just smiled and walked away."
14. Text coherence analysis: Analyze a text and determine how well it flows and how its different parts are connected. This is another one I’ll use especially in longer emails or some memoir writing I’m doing. Dropping your text into an LLM and asking for coherence analysis will give you insight into how well your text flows for a reader from a flow of thought perspective. I often add to this prompt a request to check spelling and grammar so I get all three - coherence, spelling, and grammar suggested corrections.
Prompt for Outlining Key Points in Text: This one is more in-depth but it’s one I use a lot, or some variation of it. I’m including an example. This assumes you have copied text from a webpage, pdf, or other text source and pasted it into a new Prompt window.
"Read the following text carefully. As you do, identify and list the main ideas and supporting details. Pay attention to the introduction and conclusion for insights into the purpose and overall message of the text. Additionally, note any significant facts, statistics, or examples used to support the main points. Summarize your findings by outlining the key points, including any conclusions or implications drawn by the author. Your outline should provide a clear and concise overview of the text's content, highlighting its most important aspects."
How to learn more …
Here is a prompt you can use to get your LLM to give you a list of commonly used text functions. You’ll learn more about the depth of what an LLM can do by asking your LLM to tell you what it can do.
Provide a list of the most frequently used text functions or operations commonly applied to text in general applications, such as word processing, text analysis, or digital content creation. This includes functions for text formatting, organizing, summarizing, and basic editing or manipulation techniques that are widely utilized outside of a programming context.
That’s it for now.
Drop me a note if you have questions. Let’s keep learning new concepts and new ways to discover and create new ideas.
BONUS
I found the tip below as I was writing this post today and felt it would be useful to include since I’m suggesting you keep this post handy for reference.
I’m not a fan of highly structured complex prompt formatting - unless it’s needed. However, as a template guide, it’s ‘nice to have’ this to help remember how to be more complete on more complex prompt requests. here is the link to it https://mitenmit.github.io/gpt/. I highly recommend playing around with this to help you learn more about the structure of crafting prompts. You do not ‘have’ to include ever portion of the template, it all depends on the details and completeness of the response you need.
Leave me a note on Substack if you have more questions. Thank you for being a subscriber.
Tom