Write the difficult email
Say the hard thing clearly, without sounding cold, defensive, or like a lawyer wrote it.
- Use it for
- Anyone who has been avoiding an email for three days.
Hard emails fail in two opposite directions. Too soft and the actual message doesn't land, so nothing changes and you have to send a second one. Too blunt and the recipient spends their reply defending themselves instead of solving the problem.
Asking a model to "write a professional email" reliably produces the first failure — corporate padding that buries the point. This prompt makes the message explicit and separates it from the tone, so you can be unambiguous about substance and warm about delivery at the same time.
Did this work?
You send it — and the reply engages with the substance rather than with how you said it.
Tested on claude-opus-5. Evidence status is draft; it moves to battle-tested only on recorded runs, never by hand.