The Shape Is Part Of The Request

The reformatting tax

You run the same kind of request every week. Every week you get a good answer in the wrong shape, and every week you spend four minutes turning prose into the table your document actually needs.

That is twenty minutes a month spent converting between formats, on top of a task that was supposed to be saving you time.

The fix is one line in the prompt, and most people never add it because format feels like a finishing touch rather than part of the request.

Say the shape

Compare:

Summarise the risks in this proposal.

Against:

List the risks as a table with columns: Risk, Likelihood (high/medium/low), Mitigation, Owner.

The second takes six seconds longer to write. It returns something you paste directly into the document, with consistent columns, every time.

And notice the second one did something else: by naming Owner as a column, you forced the model to consider ownership for each risk. The shape shaped the thinking.

Show the skeleton, do not describe it

Describing a format in prose works less well than handing over the thing itself.

Instead of explaining that you want a heading, then two bullets, then a recommendation, paste the empty shape:

## [Issue]
- Impact:
- Options considered:

**Recommendation:**

Then say: fill this in for each item.

This is the same principle as showing an example rather than describing a style. A skeleton is unambiguous in a way that a description of a skeleton never is.

Where this pays most

Structure earns its keep when output has somewhere to go:

• Anything pasted into a spreadsheet, where columns must line up
• Anything repeated weekly, where consistency compounds
• Anything compared across runs, which is most of evaluating a change
• Anything another person fills in too, where a shared shape prevents drift

For a one-off question you will read once and discard, skip it. This is a habit for the things you do repeatedly.