What?!  Structure?!  I don’t want structure in my prompts!  I’m using AI so that I can just talk normally so why would I want structure.  Rabble rabble rabble!

This is what I normally hear when I bring this up so I am just saving you some time.

So, why WOULD you want structure in your prompts?  

I think that the more important your output (“important” in this case means needing to be accurate, high stakes, valuable if correct, damaging if wrong, etc.), the more time you will have to spend on your input with things like more context, examples for, examples against, and, you guessed it, structure.  

If you are prompting for a random story about forklifts to pass the time, it probably isn’t “important” (how dare I? I know).

Back to the point of this post, markdown can help you add structure to the text portions of your prompt that you could normally add in a word processor. 

For example, consider the following -

This must be important, that’s why it’s heading level 1

This is also important but not as important as that up there (heading level 2)

You get the idea (heading level 3)

This is normal text

*By the way, markdown is a markup language that can be used to format and/or structure plain text.   Yes, markdown is a markup language (can’t make this stuff up).

If you wanted to get the same effect as the headings above, you can use # at the beginning of the line.  That would be for heading level 1.  Heading level 2 would be ##.  Heading level 3 would be ###.  Keep going for however many levels you want to nest.  I haven’t seen more than 6 levels.

Here’s what that would look like (make sure you add a space after the #’s) -

# This must be important, that’s why it’s heading level 1

## This is also important but not as important as that up there (heading level 2)

### You get the idea (heading level 3)

This is normal text

There’s a lot more to markdown.  This is getting long for a “quick tip” so I will walk away here.

Try using #’s in your prompts though.