Home / Writing a request that works

Being clear, direct, and giving the why

Claude behaves like a brilliant new employee with no implicit context about your habits, so a request benefits from stating the why and who will read or hear the response, not just the task to carry out.

Claude behaves like a brilliant new employee who knows neither your habits nor your sector. Claude's documentation puts it in these terms: think of Claude as a brilliant but new employee who lacks context on your norms and ways of working, and the more precisely you explain what you want, the better the result. A short request can seem clear to the person who wrote it while still resting on context that Claude never received.

The colleague test

The same documentation offers a concrete test for checking that a request is clear enough: show your request to a colleague who has almost no context on the task, and ask them to follow it to the letter. If they are lost, Claude will be too. This test works because it moves the judgement outside your own head: you generally understand your own request without effort, precisely because you already know the context that is missing from the written words.

Giving the why, not just the task

Stating the task is not always enough. Providing the context or motivation behind an instruction, by explaining why a given behaviour matters, helps Claude better understand the goal and produce more targeted responses. The documentation illustrates this point with a concrete example: a request that says to remove the ellipses from a text leaves the why to be guessed. A request that adds that the text will be read aloud by a text-to-speech engine, which cannot pronounce that mark, steers Claude towards a rewording that keeps the rhythm of the sentences rather than a simple mechanical removal.

Version faible :
Retirez les points de suspension de ce texte.

Version avec le pourquoi et le destinataire :
Ce texte sera lu à voix haute par un moteur de synthèse vocale qui ne sait pas prononcer les points de suspension. Reformulez les phrases concernées pour garder leur rythme sans ce signe.

The same logic applies to who will read or hear the response. A report intended for the board of an association does not call for the same level of detail as a message intended for a new member who is discovering the subject. Naming this reader in the request, one sentence is often enough, spares Claude from guessing a register instead of having it written down in black and white, building on the three blocks of a request already covered.

A clear request and a request that gives the why are not two separate steps to carry out one after the other: they are checked together, with the same colleague test, in a single re-read before sending the message.

Rédigez un message pour annoncer le changement d'horaires de la permanence.

Rédigez un message pour annoncer le changement d'horaires de la permanence, destiné aux adhérents qui découvrent tout juste le nouveau local ; expliquez que le changement vient d'une contrainte de bail, pour éviter les questions répétées au téléphone.