Show Claude What You Want With a Real Example
Describing a format in words is harder than it looks. "Casual but professional," "punchy," "not too corporate" all mean something specific in your head and almost nothing to anyone, or anything, reading them cold. A real example skips the translation problem entirely: instead of describing the shape you want, you show it.
Tip
An adjective describes a format. An example shows one. Claude matches patterns far more reliably than it interprets descriptions.
You don't need the right words for the tone you want. You need one paragraph that already has it.
Why an example beats a description for format and style
Words like "casual" or "concise" carry different meanings depending on who's reading them and what they've seen before. A real sample removes that ambiguity, since Claude isn't interpreting your idea of casual, it's matching an actual pattern of sentence length, word choice, and structure that's sitting right in front of it.
Here's an email I sent last month that got a great response: "Hey Jordan, quick one, saw your note about the Q3 numbers and wanted to flag something before Friday's review. The regional split looks off to me, can we grab 10 minutes tomorrow?" Write a similar email to Priya about the vendor contract renewal, same tone and length.
”Notice what's missing from that prompt: no adjectives describing the tone at all. The example does that work instead, and the result matches sentence rhythm and directness that "write a casual, brief email" would have left Claude guessing at.
When one example isn't enough
A single example teaches Claude a pattern, but it can't always tell which part of the pattern actually matters. Give one example of a headline and Claude might lock onto the specific topic rather than the underlying structure, length, and rhythm you actually meant to demonstrate.
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Start with one example for straightforward formats
A single sample usually works for something format-driven, like an email structure or a report layout, where the pattern is unambiguous.
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Add a second, different example when the pattern is subtle
Two examples on different topics that share the same underlying structure make the actual pattern obvious by contrast, since whatever's identical between them is clearly the thing worth copying.
- 3
Name what's constant across your examples explicitly
Point out directly what should carry over: "match the sentence length and directness, not the specific topic." This removes any doubt about what the examples were for.
Here are two headlines from past posts that both performed well: "Why Your Onboarding Emails Are Getting Ignored" and "The Meeting Habit That's Quietly Wasting Your Team's Time." Match that same structure and length, not the topics, for a headline about remote work burnout.
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Inside Claude Tutorial
Showing instead of describing works far beyond writing tone.
This same instinct, pasting a real sample instead of explaining what you want in words, applies to spreadsheets, code, and structured documents just as much as prose. The app covers this pattern across several different kinds of tasks.
An edge case: when you don't have a good example yet
If you don't have a strong past example to paste in, ask Claude to draft two or three genuinely different options first, then tell it which one to use as the template going forward. You're still using the example technique, just generating the example instead of pulling it from your own archive first.
Continue reading
- Giving Claude a Role Worth Following: a sibling technique for shaping output precisely, worth combining with examples.
- Getting Sharper Answers Without Writing Longer Prompts: why an example often beats another paragraph of description entirely.