CREATE
Character · Request · Examples · Adjustments · Type of output · Extras — The most iteration-aware of the templates: it has a dedicated slot for what the model must stop doing, and another for instructions about the conversation itself.
Use it for
Repeated creative-but-branded output where you have prior work to imitate and house-style rules to enforce — recruitment adverts, customer communications, marketing variants.
Avoid it for
Factual work over documents. CREATE has no source slot at all, so a task that lives or dies on grounding is badly served — use PICSE or GCSE instead.
The slots
Each letter is a question the prompt has to answer.Character
Whose voice and expertise?
A role with years and a domain. Specificity beats seniority.
Example: You are a technical recruiter with ten years hiring backend engineers for regulated fintech companies.
Request
What exactly do you want made?
One verb, one deliverable, with the details that change the answer.
Example: Write a job advert for a senior backend engineer, remote within the EU, salary band 85–105k, emphasising that our on-call rotation is genuinely light.
Examples Optional
What does right look like?
Paste one or two real prior pieces, and say what you want copied — register, structure, or both.
Example: Match the structure and dry humour of our last two adverts, pasted below.
Adjustments Optional
What must it stop doing?
Prohibitions and corrections, stated explicitly. This is the negative channel, and the reason to reach for CREATE at all.
Example: No bullet-point lists of requirements, no "rockstar" or "ninja", and never imply unpaid overtime is normal.
Type of output
What shape and length?
Format plus a number: word count, section count, medium.
Example: 350 words maximum, three short prose sections with subheadings, ready to paste into a job board.
Extras Optional
What should govern the interaction itself?
Meta-instructions: ask for clarifying questions, reasoning, or alternatives. This is about how the model works with you, not about the output.
Example: Before writing, ask me three questions about the team that you still need answered.
Strengths
- Adjustments legitimises negative constraints as part of the prompt rather than something you bolt on after a bad first draft. It is the most common real-world fix, given a proper home.
- Extras is the only slot in any mainstream template that invites the model to interrogate you, which reliably improves an under-specified request.
- Its Examples slot puts few-shot prompting in front of non-technical users without naming it.
Weaknesses
- The acronym is padded. "Type of output" is Format and "Character" is Role, so it relabels familiar slots to make the word spell CREATE, at some cost in clarity.
- The canonical definition sits behind a paywall on its author’s course, so the letter-by-letter definitions in circulation come from third parties and do not fully agree with each other.
- No grounding and no evaluation slot, so it will happily produce confident, well-formatted, unsourced output.
Sources and grounding
- 1The CREATE FrameworkDave Birss (Prompt Advantage course)Confirms authorship. The lesson body itself is paywalled, so this establishes who created it rather than the definitions.
- 2How to write an effective AI prompt using the CREATE frameworkUniversity of PittsburghFull letter-by-letter definitions, crediting the original author.
- 3How to craft effective prompts using the CREATE frameworkNYU School of Professional StudiesIndependent confirmation with worked examples per letter.