Use prompt moves that transfer

First, orient the model with the real audience and decision. Second, ground it in supplied sources. Third, constrain scope, format, and forbidden actions. Fourth, inspect by asking for assumptions, unsupported claims, or tests. Applied to this topic, those moves support investigate how later school start times affect teenagers without inventing evidence, not vague content generation.

Topic: effects of later secondary-school start times on adolescent sleep and attendance. Propose one focused question, five search phrases including a skeptical angle, and inclusion/exclusion rules. Do not provide citations. Mark every factual statement that will require a source.

The likely useful output is: A question bounded by population, intervention, outcomes, and time; search phrases include counterevidence and implementation costs; no fabricated bibliography appears. Follow with a critic pass, not a request to “improve it”:

Audit the draft against the original contract. Return a table:
criterion | pass/fail | exact evidence | smallest correction.
Do not introduce new facts. List unresolved questions separately.

This second prompt changes the mode from creation to inspection. For alternatives, request deliberately different options and specify the axis of difference. For revision, name one defect and freeze everything else. For extraction, require a schema and define unknown/null behavior. For decisions, ask for criteria, evidence, assumptions, and sensitivity—not hidden private reasoning.

A useful response would look like this: A question bounded by population, intervention, outcomes, and time; search phrases include counterevidence and implementation costs; no fabricated bibliography appears. That description is intentionally observable. “Looks good” is not acceptance. The operator must open every source, check author/date/method, follow quotes to the original, compare primary findings with limitations, and label unsupported claims. Keep the source material beside the draft so review means comparison, not memory.

Do not confuse fluent explanations with evidence. AI can map a search and organize supplied evidence; it is not the evidence. The non-negotiable habit is opening and judging the original source. The prompt is successful only when the resulting artifact survives an external check.

Watch for invented citations; treating search snippets as evidence; collapsing correlation into causation; hiding disagreement; quoting a summary instead of the source. If the answer is too broad, shrink the deliverable. If it invents, tighten “use only” boundaries and require source labels. If formatting drifts, provide a short valid example and validate mechanically. If every option sounds alike, define meaningful axes. If revision damages good sections, quote the exact passage to preserve.

Keep prompt versions with short notes: what changed, why, and what happened. That creates transferable knowledge. Copying a “perfect prompt” without its data, risk level, and reviewer rarely does.