Less Back-and-Forth: A Comparative Study of Structured Prompting

arXiv:2605.20149v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely used for open-ended tasks, but underspecified prompts can lead to low-quality answers and additional interaction. This paper studies whether structured prompt design improves response quality while reducing user effort. We compare three prompt conditions: a raw prompt, a checklist-improved prompt, and a clarifying-question prompt. We evaluate these conditions across four task types--summarization, planning,