Stop Thinking of Prompting as a Hack · Elite Writing Academy

Stop Thinking of Prompting as a Hack

Outside writing communities like ours, many people still assume prompting involves merely learning a bunch of clever tricks, shortcuts, or hacks.

I think that is one of the biggest misunderstandings around AI today.

There is no magical template that suddenly makes ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other AI tool produce brilliant writing.

That's because good prompting ultimately has little to do with the capabilities of your particular machine.

It has almost everything to do with the quality of your editorial direction.

As I’ve said several times before on this platform, prompting is best seen as an emerging craft.

Indeed, in the coming years, I believe that prompting will be increasingly recognised as one of the most important communication skills of the century.

Why?

Because the world is already waking up to the realisation that good prompting depends on an understanding of good writing.

That gives those of us who have spent years studying writing craft a distinct advantage over people who are, in effect, prompting in the dark.

Now, in recognising prompting as a craft rooted in writing mastery, I am in no way diminishing AI's extraordinary capabilities.

AI can ably assist with activities like brainstorming, planning, structuring, first-drafting, editing, and proofreading.

In other words, used wisely, it can become an extraordinary thinking and writing partner.

But rather than handing over authorship to these machines, the challenge is to learn when, and how, to collaborate with AI in ways that genuinely strengthen our writing.

The difference, ultimately, is between delegation and collaboration.

When AI is treated as a convenience or shortcut, it frequently produces generic, unmemorable content.

But when prompting is treated as a craft, it becomes grounded in the very qualities that have always defined outstanding writing: vision, style, and judgement.

It is no coincidence that these are the very qualities that have always separated exceptional writers from merely competent ones.

In other words, the better your writing instincts are, the better your prompts become. And the better your prompts become, the better your AI-assisted writing becomes.

A short experiment should help illustrate this point.

Open your favourite AI tool and enter this weak prompt:

“Write me a LinkedIn post about people feeling overwhelmed by email.”

Now compare it with this more crafted prompt:

"Write a thoughtful LinkedIn post for professionals who feel overwhelmed by the constant pressure to respond to emails quickly. Argue that the real problem is not email itself, but the growing expectation that everyone should always be available and respond almost instantly. Encourage organisations to replace this culture of constant responsiveness with clearer expectations around response times. Use a calm, humane, intelligent tone. Make the writing simple, clear, elegant, and lightly evocative. Avoid corporate clichés, motivational slogans, and obvious AI rhythms, tone, and language."

I'm not saying any of you would necessarily need to, or want to, ask AI to write something for you from scratch in this way.

I just want to encourage you to study the two different styles of prompting, and their results.

The second prompt gives AI three things the first one doesn't:

Literary vision: what the piece is trying to say.

Artistic taste: how the writing should feel to read.

Editorial judgement: what must be avoided.

That is the difference between asking AI to fill up the page for you — and directing your machine toward a potentially worthwhile draft of writing built around your own thinking.

Don’t just ask yourself which version is better. Ask yourself why. That “why” is where the craft of prompting begins.

You can try to improve the output further with your own version of these “the three tiers of prompting mastery.”

The idea itself comes from one of the opening lessons in AI Writing Mastery, which is available to all premium members of the academy and may be purchased by others.

Every lesson in the course builds on the last one, gradually developing prompting from a collection of tricks into an authentic professional craft.

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Stop Thinking of Prompting as a Hack