6. Show It What You Want Instead of Describing It

There is one technique that improves output more than everything in lessons 1 through 5 combined, and it takes less effort than any of them. Instead of describing the style you want, you paste in 2 or 3 examples of it.

Anthropic's own guidance calls examples "your secret weapon" for this, and having tested it side by side we think that is understated. Describing a voice is hard. Recognizing one is easy. Showing examples lets you skip the hard part entirely.

The same request, with and without

We asked for a product description. First without examples:

Write a short product description for a stainless
steel water bottle, 750ml, keeps drinks cold 24 hours,
$34.

What came back opened with "Stay hydrated, all day long" and then ran through double-wall insulation, ice-cold drinks, the gym, the office and the trail, durable construction that resists dents and corrosion, and a secure screw cap. Every phrase in it is a phrase you have read a thousand times, because it is the average of every product page on the internet.

Then the same request with 3 examples of a distinctive house style pasted underneath. Same model, same 20 seconds:

Stainless Steel Water Bottle, 750ml, $34

Keeps cold for 24 hours. Heavier than plastic, which is intentional: steel does not crack, leak, or develop a plastic taste. No condensation means your backpack stays dry.

That is a different writer. It leads with the honest downside, weight, and turns it into the reason to buy. It picked up the short declarative sentences and the habit of naming what the product is not. Nobody described any of that to it. It read 3 examples and inferred the rules.

What the examples looked like

Here is the actual prompt. The examples are the whole thing:

Write a short product description for a stainless
steel water bottle, 750ml, keeps drinks cold 24 hours,
$34.

Match the style of these examples exactly.

<example>
Canvas Tote, $28
It holds a laptop, a lunch, and a paperback. That is
the whole pitch. The handles are long enough to go over
a shoulder with a coat on, which is the part most totes
get wrong.
</example>

<example>
Wool Beanie, $22
Merino, so it does not itch. One size, which we can say
honestly because we tested it on 40 heads and it fit 38
of them. The other 2 have very large heads and we are
sorry.
</example>

<example>
Leather Card Holder, $45
Four cards and a folded note. If you carry more than
that, buy a wallet. It arrives stiff and stops being
stiff after about 2 weeks in a back pocket.
</example>

Those tags are not magic syntax, but wrapping each example in something makes the boundaries unambiguous, and unambiguous is the whole game. Three examples is the sweet spot. One is not enough to establish a pattern. Six is not much better than three.

The failure we hit doing this, which you should know about

Read the full output from the styled version again. The last sentence, which we cut from the quote above, was this:

We tested it frozen at 8 PM and checked at 8 AM the next morning. Still cold.

Nobody tested anything. There is no bottle. It invented a test, with times in it, and it invented it because our examples taught it to. Our beanie example said "we tested it on 40 heads", so the pattern it correctly extracted from our style was "this brand cites specific tests", and it produced one.

We would rather show you that than a clean demo, because you will hit it in your first week and it is better to recognize it than to publish it.

Where to get your examples

You almost certainly already have them and have not thought of them as examples:

• Emails you have already sent. Open your sent folder, find 3 you were happy with, paste them in. This is the fastest way to get it writing like you.
• The best 3 of whatever you make. Reports, listings, updates, replies. Pick your favorites, not your average ones.
• Someone else's work you admire, for a style you want to learn rather than one you have. Fine for your own drafts, obviously not fine for passing off as theirs.
• A shape rather than a voice. Examples also teach structure. Two examples of a bug report in your team's format will get the format right where a paragraph of description will not.

The other use, which is quietly more valuable

Examples are not only for style. They are also the most reliable way to define a task with fuzzy edges. Suppose you are sorting customer messages into "urgent" and "not urgent". Describing where that line falls is genuinely hard. Showing 6 messages already sorted is easy, and you will get better agreement than any definition you could write.

Sort each message as urgent or not urgent, matching
how I sorted these:

<example>"Site is down for all users" → urgent</example>
<example>"When does my trial end?" → not urgent</example>
<example>"Charged twice this month" → urgent</example>
<example>"Can you add dark mode?" → not urgent</example>

Now sort these: [paste]

Include an edge case among your examples. That is where the disagreements live, and one well chosen borderline example teaches more than 4 obvious ones.

The classification example, run for real

We ran the urgent sorter above on 5 messages it had not seen. The 4 examples were the only instruction it had about where the line falls. Results:

Message	Sorted as
Cannot log in, reset password twice	Urgent
Do you have an annual plan?	Not urgent
My team of 12 all lost access this morning	Urgent
Export button slightly misaligned on Safari	Not urgent
Cancelling, confirm you will not bill me again	Urgent

All 5 match how we would have sorted them. The last row is the interesting one, because "cancelling" is not obviously an emergency. It grouped it with the double-charge example, correctly reading that our line was about money and access rather than about tone.

Then, unprompted, it stated the rule it had inferred:

urgent = blocks access or requires immediate account/billing action; not urgent = questions or minor cosmetic issues

That is a better articulation of our own policy than we gave it, and we never wrote it down. This is worth doing deliberately: sort 6 items by hand, ask it to infer the rule, and you get your own implicit standard written out. Then you can argue with it.

How many examples, and which ones

• Three is the working minimum for style. With 1 it copies that example. With 3 it extracts the pattern between them.
• For sorting tasks, 5 to 8, including 2 borderline cases. The obvious ones teach almost nothing. The line is what you are trying to communicate.
• Vary everything except the thing you are teaching. If all 3 of your email examples are to clients, it will learn "write to clients" as part of the style.
• Use your best, not your average. It matches what you show it, so showing mediocre work gets you mediocre work, faithfully.

Three mistakes with examples

1. Examples that contradict each other. If one is 40 words and formal and another is 200 words and chatty, there is no pattern to find and you get the average of the two.
2. Forgetting to mark where they end. Without a tag or a clear separator it sometimes reads your examples as part of the request and tries to edit them.
3. Not checking the facts it borrowed. The bottle test above. Style transfers, and so does the habit of asserting things.

Do this one now

Open your sent mail. Find 3 messages you were genuinely pleased with. Paste them in with the line "match the style of these examples exactly", then give it a real message to write.

This is the moment most people stop thinking of AI output as generic, because it stops being generic.

Next

You now have prompts and examples that work. Lesson 7 is about not retyping them every single time.