One habit produces more value than everything else in this course combined: paste the real thing instead of describing it from memory.
Claude can only work with what it can see
Here's a mistake almost everyone makes at first. A customer sends a long, complicated email. The owner opens Claude and types "a customer is asking about a refund for a cancelled booking, write a reply." Claude writes something generic, because it never saw the email.
Now the better version: paste the customer's actual email and say "write a reply to this." Suddenly Claude answers their exact questions, matches their tone, and catches details you'd already forgotten were in there. Same effort from you. Wildly different result.
Your description of a thing is always thinner than the thing. Paste the thing.
Three ways to hand things over
Paste text. Emails, texts, meeting notes, reviews. Copy the whole thing, paste it right in the chat.
Attach files. The paperclip icon takes PDFs, Word docs, and spreadsheets. Contracts, invoices, price lists.
Photograph paperwork. On your phone, snap a picture of the form, the whiteboard, the handwritten note. Claude reads images.
The prompt
Copy-paste prompt
Below is a real email from a customer. Write a reply that answers every question they asked, keeps a friendly tone, and stays under 120 words.
Here's the email:
{paste the whole email here}