Directives for Prompts
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When writing a prompt for an AI tool to generate a technical document, one common strategy is called CRAFT [1-4]: context, role, action, format, and target (or tone). You can think of context as background on the document that the AI tool needs: "We have written an initial report (attached) for the design of an exhibit at a children's science museum." Role is the author persona that the AI tool is to adopt, and action is the task that the AI tool is to perform: "Assuming that you are an author of this report, write a summary...." Format is simply the requested format of the writing: "...write a summary as a single paragraph that is no more than 1000 characters."
In the CRAFT strategy, target (and tone) are better thought of as audience and writing style. In the technical summary example, the audience for the summary is the same as for the report. As far as the style, this web page presents several directives to improve the writing style over what ChatGPT produced. |
- high percentage (96%) of sentences openers being either the subject or a participial phrase (p < 0.001)
- low percentage (8%) of sentences containing dependent clauses (p < 0.001)
- high percentage (28%) of sentences ending with participial phrases (p < 0.001)
- no use first person (we or our), even though the reports judiciously used those words
References
- Michael Alley, Hala Hobrom, and Suryansh Sijwali, “Three Stylistic Weaknesses of AI Writing in Engineering Documents and Prompts to Address Those Weaknesses,” extended abstract, 2026 ASEE St. Lawrence Regional Conference (Ithaca, NY: ASEE St. Lawrence Regional Conference, 25 April 2026).
* AI was not used to generate text for this webpage.