Show one example instead of five adjectives

"Make it engaging." "Keep it professional but friendly." "Punchy, not salesy."

These feel like instructions. They aren't. They're adjectives, and adjectives compress an enormous amount of unstated judgement into a word whose meaning you and the model do not share.

The naive attempt

Write product descriptions in our house style: engaging, concise, benefit-led, and never gimmicky.

You will get something engaging, concise and benefit-led. According to the average of everything written under those labels. That average is not your house style. Your house style is a specific set of choices: whether you use second person, whether you lead with the problem or the product, sentence rhythm, whether you're allowed a joke, how you handle specs.

Every one of those is invisible in the adjective list, and every one of them is visible instantly in a single real example.

Why examples beat descriptions

A worked example transmits, simultaneously and without you having to notice them: register, sentence length, structure, level of technical detail, how numbers get formatted, what gets omitted, what order things come in, and roughly a dozen things you'd never think to write down.

You could try to write all that out. It would take a page, you'd miss half of it, and the model would have to reconstruct the style from your description of it. A lossy round trip through language when you could have just shown the thing.

The better version

Write product descriptions in our house style. Here is one that's exactly right:

Input: Merino wool crew socks. 80% merino, 20% nylon. Sizes 4-13. $24. Machine washable. Made in Portugal.

Output: Socks you forget you're wearing, which is the whole point. Merino handles the temperature swing between a cold office and a warm commute, and the nylon means they survive the washing machine. No hand-washing ritual, no shrinking.

80% merino, 20% nylon. Sizes 4-13. Made in Portugal. $24.

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What stays fixed: the opening line names a lived experience rather than a feature. The middle paragraph explains one material choice in terms of a situation the reader recognises. Specs go last, unadorned, as a single line. Never more than 80 words before the specs.

What varies: the specific experience and the material being justified. Pick whatever is genuinely most interesting about the item, not always the fabric.

Note what the annotation does. The example transmits the style; the annotation tells the model which parts are structure (reproduce these) and which are content (vary these). Without that split, you get pastiche. Descriptions of every product that somehow mention temperature swings and washing machines.

Common mistakes

A fragment instead of a full example. Something like "Socks you forget you're wearing, but for the whole catalogue". That gives you the opening register and nothing about structure, length, or how it ends.

A placeholder example. "Input: Product A. Output: A great description of Product A." This transmits nothing. If you can't be bothered to write a real example, the model can't be bothered to infer your style from it.

One example when you needed three. A single example pins style but can also overfit: everything comes back suspiciously similar to it. If your outputs should vary in structure, show two or three that vary in exactly that way. The variation between your examples teaches the allowed range as clearly as the examples themselves teach the style.

Examples that disagree with your instructions. If you say "under 80 words" and your example is 140, the example wins. Models weight demonstrated behaviour above stated rules, which is usually what you want, but only if your example is actually correct. Check your examples against your own rules before shipping them.

Where this doesn't help

Examples are expensive in a long prompt, and they anchor hard. When the task needs genuine novelty, when you want ideas you have not already seen, a strong example narrows the search to variations on itself. For divergent work, describe the constraints and deliberately withhold examples. Or supply examples of what you have already rejected.

They also can't fix a task that's underspecified in kind rather than in style. An example of a good summary won't tell the model which document to summarise.

The move

Next time you're about to write "make it more [adjective]", stop and instead find or write one output that is that thing. Paste it in. Annotate what's fixed and what varies. It takes three minutes and replaces an argument you'd otherwise have across four rerolls.