Less Back-and-Forth: A Comparative Study of Structured Prompting
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used for open-ended tasks, but underspecified prompts can lead to low-quality answers and additional interaction. This paper studies whether structured prompt design improves response quality while reducing user effort. We compare three prompt conditions: a raw prompt, a checklist-improved prompt, and a clarifying-question prompt. We evaluate these conditions across four task types--summarization, planning, explanation, and coding--using three LLM systems: ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok. Each output is scored with a unified rubric covering task completion, correctness, compliance, and clarity. Checklist-improved prompts achieved the highest mean rubric s...
| Authors | Saurav Ghosh |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 19 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 October 2026 |
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