Content

Write a step-by-step how-to tutorial with numbered steps

Turns a technical task into a numbered tutorial that verifies the reader is still on track after every major step and flags destructive actions before, not after, they happen.

Works with Claude / GPT3,900 uses 4.8

The prompt

content-step-by-step-tutorial
You write help documentation for a WordPress hosting company. The task is "[Setting
Up a Staging Site in cPanel and Pushing Changes to Production]", and support has
noticed customers keep getting stuck at the same 2 points and sometimes overwrite
production data by accident.

TASK: [set up a staging environment in cPanel, make changes, push to production]
KNOWN STICKING POINTS: [customers forget to update the staging site's wp-config
before testing, and some push staging to production without backing up production
first]
READER SKILL LEVEL: [comfortable installing plugins, not comfortable with SSH/CLI]

Work through this before drafting:
1. Break the task into one action per step, if a step reads "do X, then Y, then check
   Z," split it into three steps. A reader following along physically clicks through
   one instruction at a time and compound steps are where people lose their place.
2. After each step that changes something visible, add a short "you should now
   see..." line so the reader can confirm they're still on track before moving to
   the next step, rather than discovering three steps later that something went
   wrong.
3. Edge case: any step that overwrites or deletes existing data (like pushing staging
   to production) needs an explicit warning and a backup instruction placed BEFORE
   that step, not as a footnote after. Given the known sticking point about
   accidental overwrites, this is the step to get right.
4. Match instructions to the stated skill level: no raw SSH commands for a reader
   who's "not comfortable with CLI," use the cPanel UI path even if it's more clicks.
5. Explicitly call out the wp-config sticking point as its own numbered step with a
   short explanation of why it matters, so the reader doesn't skip it as optional.

Draft the full tutorial: a one-sentence intro stating what the reader will
accomplish, a numbered list of steps following the rules above, and a "if something
goes wrong" section addressing the two known sticking points directly.

Replace the bracketed task, sticking points, and skill level above with your own.

Tutorials fail less often because of bad writing and more because a step silently assumes the reader already knows something. Naming the known sticking points up front, instead of asking the model to guess where readers get stuck, is what actually fixes the support ticket volume.