The Five-Part Prompt
12 min read
A good prompt is really a good briefing — that's the case we built in Brief It Like a New Hire. This lesson turns the instinct into a reusable structure: five parts, each answering a question a new hire would ask before starting.
Role. Context. Task. Format. Constraints. Let's build one for real.
The situation
Priya owns a boutique fitness studio in Vancouver. Classes are capped at 12 people, and the cap is the product — it feels like a team, not a gym. Since January, 38 members have let their memberships lapse. Most drifted away because of winter and busy schedules, not because anything went wrong. She's just launched a spring pass — 10 classes for $189 — and wants a win-back email.
Her vague version would be "write an email to get old members back." You already know what the internet's average of that looks like. Instead, she builds it in five parts.
Role: hand it a hat
Start by telling the model what kind of professional it's standing in for: "You're an email copywriter who works with boutique fitness studios." One sentence, big effect. A role sets the defaults — vocabulary, instincts, what the model assumes matters. Copywriter mode writes differently than assistant mode.
Keep roles believable. "World's greatest marketing genius" adds nothing; "copywriter who works with small fitness studios" narrows the model onto the right patch of its training.
Context: load the desk
Next comes everything a stranger would need to know: a Vancouver studio, classes capped at 12, 38 lapsed members since January, they left over schedules rather than dissatisfaction, and the offer is a $189 spring pass for 10 classes. The reason they left changes the entire email — busy people need a warm door held open, unhappy ones need an apology. Without context, the model guesses which.
Task: one clear job
"Write a win-back email inviting lapsed members to return with the spring pass." One sentence, one job. Resist stapling extra work onto it — "and also give me ten Instagram captions" belongs in its own prompt. Models handle a single well-defined task far better than a to-do list, and so, for the record, do new hires.
Format: shape the output
Tell it what the finished thing looks like: one subject line, a body under 150 words, ending in a single call to action. Format instructions are the cheapest quality upgrade in prompting, because without them the model defaults to whatever length and shape is most common online. Usually: too long.
Constraints: the guardrails
Last, the review comments you'd otherwise make after the fact: warm and personal, zero guilt about the absence, at most one exclamation mark, and no invented discounts — the pass is the offer. Constraints are where your taste lives. Everything you've ever muttered while editing someone's draft goes here.
The assembled prompt
Role: You're an email copywriter who works with boutique fitness
studios.
Context: I own a small studio in Vancouver — classes are capped
at 12, so it feels more like a team than a gym. 38 members have
let their memberships lapse since January. Most left because of
winter and busy schedules, not because they were unhappy. We've
just launched a spring pass: 10 classes for $189.
Task: Write a win-back email inviting lapsed members to come
back with the spring pass.
Format: One subject line, then a body under 150 words, ending
with a single call to action (a link to buy the pass).
Constraints: Warm and personal, zero guilt about their absence,
at most one exclamation mark, and don't invent a discount — the
pass is the offer.Priya's first result was a solid 85 percent draft: right warmth, right length, a subject line she tweaked in ten seconds. Her vague version, run for comparison, came back with three exclamation marks and a fictional 20-percent-off coupon.
Each part maps to a question a new hire would ask before touching the work:
| Prompt part | The new-hire question it answers |
|---|---|
| Role | "What hat am I wearing for this?" |
| Context | "What do I need to know about the business and the reader?" |
| Task | "What exactly am I doing?" |
| Format | "What should the finished thing look like?" |
| Constraints | "What would make you send this back to me?" |
You won't always need all five
Quick asks don't need the ceremony — "give me five subject lines for this email" works fine bare. The structure earns its keep on anything customer-facing or longer than a paragraph. And it doubles as a diagnostic: when output disappoints, read your prompt against the five parts and find the one you skipped. Nine times out of ten, it's Context.
The labels themselves are optional. The model reads flowing sentences just as well. What matters is that all five decisions are present — not that they're wearing name tags.
Try it now
Pick the one piece of writing your business repeats most — a quote follow-up, a class announcement, a review reply. Write out the five parts for it and run it. Then save the prompt somewhere you can find it, because you've just built the first entry in your prompt library. Next time, it's a 30-second fill-in-the-blanks job instead of a blank page.