Prompts For Writing

Writing is the task most professionals use AI for first — and the one where the gap between a weak prompt and a strong one is most visible. The difference between getting a generic draft you'll discard and getting something close to what you'd actually send comes down to how much information you give the model before it starts generating.

This chapter covers the three most common writing tasks in professional life — emails, reports, and presentations — with prompt templates and techniques specific to each.

Writing Emails

Email is where most people start with AI — and where vague prompts cause the most frustration. The model doesn't know your relationship with the recipient, the history of the conversation, or the tone your organization uses. You need to supply all of that.

The core email prompt template:

The components that matter most for email:

• Tone — professional and warm is not the same as formal. Be specific about the register you need;
• Goal — an email that informs requires a different structure than one that requests, apologizes, or persuades;
• Relationship context — "a client we've worked with for three years" produces a different output than "a new prospect we've never spoken to."

Writing Reports

Reports have more structure than emails — and that structure is exactly what you should specify in the prompt. The more clearly you define the sections, audience, and purpose, the less editing the output will need.

The core report prompt template:

A useful technique for reports: give AI the raw material first, then ask it to structure it. Paste your bullet-point notes or data into the prompt, followed by the instruction to turn them into a formatted report section. This produces more accurate output than asking AI to generate content from scratch.

Writing Presentation Content

Presentations require a different kind of writing — short, punchy, structured for slides rather than for reading. AI handles this well when you specify the medium explicitly, because the default writing mode for most models is continuous prose.

The core presentation prompt template:

An important constraint to add for presentations: Write for slides, not for reading — keep all text scannable at a glance. Without this, models tend to write sentences that are too long for a slide format.

Practice: Write One Of Each

Choose one task from each category below and apply the corresponding template:

1. An email you've been putting off writing — use the email template with full context and a clear goal;
2. A summary or section from a report you're working on — paste your raw notes and ask AI to structure them;
3. A 3-slide summary of something you need to present — use the slide format instruction explicitly.

For each one, compare the first output to what you'd have written yourself. Note where it saved time and where it still needed editing. That gap is your prompt to refine.