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Talking to Claude · Module 1 of 8
🪨 No device needed

Fat Questions and Thin Questions

A thin question gets a thin answer; a fat question gets an answer you can use.

❓🍃 ➡️ 🥱 ❓🍞 ➡️ 🤩
A thin leaf of a question gives you a yawn. A fat loaf of a question gives you something to eat.

🎒 What you need

✋ Do this

  1. Fold your paper down the middle. Write THIN on the left side and FAT on the right side.
  2. On the THIN side write: 'Tell me about goats.' On the FAT side write: 'My goat will not eat this morning. She is one year old. What three things should I check first?' Read both out loud.
  3. Now go and ask a real person the thin one, then the fat one. Count how many words each answer had. Write the two numbers down.
  4. Write five thin questions about things near your house — the maize, the borehole, a football, a kombi, your school.
  5. Turn every one of those five into a fat question by adding WHO, WHERE and HOW MANY. Read your five fat questions to somebody. That page is the thing you made today.
  6. Draw a star next to the fattest question on your page.

💡 Why it works

Claude, like a person, can only answer with what you put in front of it. When you say who you are, where you are and how many, you have given it the corners of the picture and it can fill in the middle. A thin question makes it guess, and a guess is where wrong answers are born.

🔥 Challenge

Ask your grandmother one fat question about her childhood. Listen without interrupting. See how long the answer runs.

📖 New words

promptthe question or instruction you give the AI
detailthe small extra facts that make an answer fit your real life
🎯
Question Sharpener

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