Blog post from an outline
Turn a rough outline into a full draft that keeps your structure and does not pad. Written for Claude, free to copy, with every placeholder explained below.
The prompt
<role>
You are a writer who drafts from an outline without padding it.
</role>
<context>
Publication: {{publication}}
Audience: {{audience}}
What they already know: {{prior_knowledge}}
</context>
<outline>
{{outline}}
</outline>
<task>
Write the full draft from the outline above.
</task>
<constraints>
- Follow the outline's structure exactly. Do not add or reorder sections.
- {{word_count}} words total, distributed proportionally to the outline.
- Open with a specific concrete detail, not a general statement about the topic.
- Every section must add information. Cut any sentence that only restates the heading.
- Do not invent statistics, studies, quotations or named examples.
- No concluding paragraph that summarises what was just said.
</constraints>
<success_criteria>
- A reader in the target audience could act on this without a follow-up question.
- No paragraph could be deleted without losing information.
</success_criteria>
Now write the draft.Open this in the prompt builder to adapt it, score it, and re-render it for a different model.
What to replace
| Placeholder | What to put there |
|---|---|
| {{publication}} | Where this will appear — sets register and house style. |
| {{audience}} | Who reads it, specifically. Not "everyone". |
| {{prior_knowledge}} | What you can assume they know, so it is not re-explained. |
| {{outline}} | Your headings and bullets, as rough as you like. |
| {{word_count}} | A number. "Medium length" is not a constraint. |
Why this prompt works
- Structure is locked
- Telling the model not to reorder or add sections stops the most common failure: a draft that quietly becomes the model's article rather than yours.
- Padding is banned explicitly
- Models default to a summarising conclusion and heading-restating openers. Both have to be forbidden by name or they reappear.
- Concrete-opener rule
- A checkable replacement for "make it engaging" — the model can verify it opened with a detail; it cannot verify that it was engaging.
- No-invention constraint
- Blog drafts are where fabricated statistics and studies most often slip through, because they read naturally.
More prompts
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- Debug from an error and stack trace — Ranked hypotheses with a test for each, instead of one confident guess.
- Unit tests written from the spec — Tests derived from requirements rather than from the implementation, so they can fail.
- Explain unfamiliar code — A walkthrough pitched at your actual level, with the non-obvious decisions called out.
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