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TABLE 2-5: APPLYING PACFT TO A SINGLE TASK

Element Question Example

What will change after the
Purpose Choosing the next step in a meeting.
output is used?

Who will use it, and what do
Audience Non-technical staff with five minutes.
they know?

Which facts and constraints A manual process that causes a weekly
Context
have an effect? delay.

How will the output be A memo: problem, options,
Format
delivered? recommendation, next steps.

Direct and neutral, without
Tone How should the writing sound?
overstatement.

▣ Practical example: improving a productivity memo
Context: a team spends six hours a week assembling a report.
Task: prepare a decision memo.

PACFT: the purpose is to choose a small experiment; the audience is the operations
manager; the context is three data sources and a recurring delay; the format is one page
plus a risk table; the tone is executive and neutral.
Verification: every figure is checked and linked to its source before the memo is sent.

● Remember: Section summary
• Key idea: A recall framework helps you remember what to state; it does not decide
what a good result is.
• Practical decision: Write the five elements, then add what they do not cover: the

material, the ranking of instructions, and the acceptance criteria.
• Mistake to avoid: Presenting a teaching aid as an international standard, or treating a
filled template as a tested prompt.

2.6 Examples and Patterns: When Showing Beats Describing

◆ Key idea: show the system the shape you mean.
When a tone, a category, or a structure is hard to describe, one good example may be
more useful than a long paragraph. But an example also sets an implicit pattern, so it

must be representative and must not contain an error or a bias you are trying to avoid.

In zero-shot prompting we rely on instructions alone. This suits familiar, clearly defined tasks.

In one-shot prompting we give a single example that shows the shape or the standard. In

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