Teach with Examples

The single easiest way to get answers in the exact style you want: show Claude one or two examples of a perfect answer, then ask your question. Claude copies the pattern. Professionals call this “few-shot prompting”.

Why show instead of tell

You could spend a paragraph describing the tone you want — warm, short, reassuring, no technical words. Or you could simply show one finished answer written that way. Showing is usually faster to write and more reliable in the result. The number of examples is the “shots”: zero-shot means no examples, one-shot means one, few-shot means a handful.

Example: the parent bot

Imagine building a “parent bot” that answers children’s questions. Asked plainly, Claude gives an honest, careful answer — the kind that would break a child’s heart:

Instead of describing the tone, show one example of it and let Claude continue the pattern:

Examples also teach exact formatting

The same trick controls format. Suppose you paste a paragraph about a town and want the people in it listed as a numbered roster — each name followed by their profession in brackets, the whole list wrapped in <individuals> markers. Rather than writing long formatting instructions, paste one or two earlier paragraphs together with their correctly formatted rosters, then the new paragraph. Claude studies the pattern and produces the new roster in exactly the same shape — numbering, brackets, markers and all.