Feed It Examples of What You Want

You know that frustrating loop where you keep saying "no, more casual" or "make it shorter" or "that's not what I meant"? There's a shortcut: just show it.

Copy-paste a piece of writing you love — a tweet, an email, a product description, whatever — and tell AI: "Match this tone and structure, but write about [your topic]."

It'll nail the vibe on the first try instead of the fifth.

This works because AI is phenomenal at pattern matching. When you give it an example, it picks up on sentence length, vocabulary level, punctuation style, humor — stuff that's nearly impossible to describe in words but obvious when you see it.

How to do it well: • Paste 2-3 examples for even better results (it'll find the common patterns) • Be explicit about what to match: "Match the tone and length, but the topic should be about meal prepping" • If something's off, point to the specific example: "Make it sound more like Example 2"

This technique has a fancy name in AI circles — "few-shot prompting." But you don't need to remember that. Just remember: show, don't tell.