Advanced: Multi-step Email Workflows
What you will learn
- Use chain-of-thought prompting to handle complex email scenarios
- Apply few-shot prompting by giving AI examples of your writing style
- Build multi-step workflows for difficult emails (bad news, negotiations, sensitive follow-ups)
Knowledge check
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Key takeaway
For complex emails — delivering bad news, negotiating, or handling sensitive topics — a single prompt usually isn't enough. Chain-of-thought prompting (asking AI to reason through the situation step by step before writing) and few-shot prompting (giving it examples of your past emails) produce dramatically better results.
Practice Exercise
Hands-on practice — do this now to lock in what you learned
Open an AI assistant and try this:
Think of a difficult email you've been putting off — maybe delivering unwelcome news, asking for something you feel awkward about, or responding to a complaint. Use the chain-of-thought technique: first ask AI to analyze the situation (reader's perspective, key information needed, desired outcome), then ask it to write the email based on its analysis. Notice how much better the output is compared to a single-step prompt.