Tutorials Prompt Engineering Tutorial
Instruction Prompting — Complete Guide
Instruction Prompting — Complete Guide: free step-by-step lesson with examples, common mistakes, and interview tips — part of Prompt Engineering Tutorial on Toolliyo Academy.
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Prompt Engineering Tutorial · Lesson 14 of 100
Instruction Prompting
Prompts → Apps
Prompts · 1 — Basics · ~6 min · Module 2: Basic Prompting Techniques
What is this?
Instruction prompting states clear orders: do X, avoid Y, use Z format. Imperatives beat vague asks like "help me with this."
Why should you care?
PromptVerse copilot system cards are mostly instruction blocks parsed into the system message.
See it live — copy this example
Copy the prompt into ChatGPT, Claude, or your LLM API playground and compare outputs.
Instructions:
1. Rewrite the paragraph for a CFO audience.
2. Keep all numbers unchanged.
3. Remove vendor marketing adjectives.
4. Output exactly 2 short paragraphs.
Paragraph: ...What happened?
- Numbered imperatives define scope and forbidden edits.
- "Exactly 2 paragraphs" prevents rambling executive summaries.
Practice next
- Take a vague prompt and rewrite as 4 numbered rules.
- Run both on the same text.
- Add a "do not" rule.
- Add "if over 200 words, bullet the second paragraph".
- Switch audience from CFO to engineer.
Remember
Tell the model what to do and avoid. Number rules for clarity. Put instructions before data.
Exec summary node
Marketing briefs go to leadership.
Outcome: Instruction template standardizes tone without another model fine-tune.
Interview prep for this lesson
Practice these questions aloud after reading—each links to a full structured answer.
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