A prompt to edit only specific passages (when you have five of them)

By Elad Diamant·Published April 24, 2026

For one correction, "only edit the bit about X, leave the rest alone" works fine most of the time. The reason you're searching for a better prompt is that you have five of them, and somewhere around the fourth one — the original answer scrolled off-screen, the chat box six lines tall — you started writing worse versions of each correction, then sending the message with two of them missing and the model still picking the wrong target on the rest.

The fix is not a sharper prompt. It is a feedback block — one message, five anchored corrections, no abandoned points.

The prompts you've already tried, ranked by reliability

On a long document (call it 1,800+ words), here is roughly what each variant gets you when you actually managed to type the correction at all. These are the patterns anyone who has tried this fifty times will recognize.

The jump from 70% to 98% on the table is real — but it's the smaller of the two jumps that decide whether your draft converges in one round. The bigger one is invisible in the table because the table only counts corrections that made it into the message. The corrections you abandoned around point four — the ones you decided weren't worth the typing — were 0% reliable by definition. The format below moves both numbers at once: the per-correction ceiling rises (verbatim quotes anchor the model), and the writing tax drops far enough that points four and five also get raised.

If you want the full argument for why this is a writing-tax problem before it's a prompt problem — and what changes when each correction is a highlight + note instead of a sentence — the piece is here. The rest of this playbook is templates you can paste.

The template (one passage, one edit)

Apply this edit to your last answer. Leave everything else unchanged.

"<paste the exact passage, verbatim, including punctuation>"
<your note about what should change>

Three things make this reliable:

• The prefix is short and specific. Not "please carefully consider…" Just what the model should do.
• The quoted passage is verbatim. Typos in the quote are the #1 reason this format fails — the model can't find the match, and silently skips the edit.
• The note is directly under the quote, so attention localizes the instruction to that region.

The template (five passages, one message)

When the list gets long, the same pattern scales — just add a separator between pairs so the model cannot bleed context between them:

Apply these edits to your last answer. Leave everything else unchanged.
---

"The system leverages a cross-functional synergy touchpoint"
[Off tone] Rewrite as "connects to X". Delete the corporate phrasing.

---

"delight velocity"
[Delete] We do not measure this. Remove the phrase entirely.

---

"The FAQ opens with three questions about pricing."
Move this paragraph to the end of the product-overview section.

---

"moreover,"
[Delete] Third "moreover" in this section. Pick one, delete the rest.

---

"Users will onboard via a Slack-first flow"
[Factually wrong] We do not have a Slack integration. Change to "via an email-first onboarding flow."

---

Five passages. One message. One round-trip. No follow-up to clarify which bullet you meant — and, more importantly, no second of the five passages quietly downgraded to "the model will probably catch this on its own." The cost of raising the fifth correction is the cost of one highlight + one note, not progressively worse than the first.

The [Label] in brackets is optional — it is a shorthand the model parses easily (Delete, Off tone, Made it up, Too vague, Too long). You can skip it and just write the note. The quote and the note are the load-bearing parts.

If you have system-prompt control

If you're hitting the model through the API, a custom GPT, a Claude Project's instructions, or a Cursor .cursorrules — you have one extra lever the chat-only user doesn't. A short system-prompt rule lets you skip the per-message "leave everything else unchanged" ritual.

When the user provides feedback as paired blocks of "quoted passage" + note,
separated by ---, treat each block as an atomic edit:
- Locate the quoted passage in the document by exact string match.
- Apply the note's instruction to that passage only.
- Leave every byte outside quoted passages unchanged.
- If a quoted passage cannot be matched verbatim, skip it and report the failure
  at the end. Do not approximate.

When the user does not use this format, you may apply edits more liberally
but must summarize what you changed.

This is the kind of rule that lives well in a .cursorrules file at the repo root, in a Claude Project's "instructions" field, or in a custom GPT's system prompt. It generalizes the paired-passage discipline across every conversation, so you stop typing the prefix manually. It's the highest-leverage change in this whole post if you have access to the system layer.

Per-model notes

Claude (Sonnet / Opus)

Handles the format cleanly out of the box. On very long documents (10k+ words in a single turn), append "Return the full edited document after applying all edits." if you want the whole thing back; otherwise Claude sometimes returns just the edited passages, which is often what you actually wanted. Anthropic's own prompt-engineering guide covers the underlying preference for explicit, structured instructions in more depth.

ChatGPT (GPT-4 / GPT-5 class)

Works identically. One quirk: ChatGPT has a slight bias toward "improving" adjacent sentences for flow. The "Leave everything else unchanged" prefix is not optional — drop it and the behavior creeps back in.

Cursor (chat mode)

Works in chat mode. In Composer or Agent mode the model has file-editing tools and will sometimes apply the edit as a diff you have to accept. That is usually what you want. For long markdown files specifically, there is a separate playbook because Cursor's tool-call behavior on prose vs code is worth its own piece.

Gemini (Pro / Ultra)

Works. Gemini occasionally returns the full document with the edits applied even when you didn't ask — this is usually fine, sometimes annoying. Adding "Only show the edited passages in your response" to the prefix gets you the compact form.

What can still go wrong

• Quote mismatch. Your quote has a typo, a smart-quote, or a whitespace difference the original doesn't have. The model silently skips that block. Diff the reply, find the skipped ones, fix the quote, resend the missing blocks specifically.
• Overlapping quotes. Two of your quoted passages overlap — same sentence referenced twice with different notes. The model usually handles this, occasionally gets confused. If you need overlaps, make the notes unambiguous about which aspect of the passage you're editing ("[Tone]" vs "[Fact]").
• Asking for a restructure. If your note is "move this paragraph to a different section," the model has to do more than a local edit. This still works, just less reliably than a phrasing change. For restructures, it is often cleaner to split into two passes: fix the local edits first, then ask for the move.

What will actually obsolete this post

Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and Gemini will all, almost certainly, ship a native "click here to leave a comment on this passage" surface inside of a year. Probably some of them in the next quarter. The prompt-as-a-format workaround in this post will then look quaint — the way "save as HTML, open in Word, use Track Changes" looks quaint now.

Fine. Until then, the templates above are what work. The reason to use a tool instead of typing them by hand isn't the typing — it's that hand-building the block for five passages is itself enough work that you'll do it for two and call it a day. PassbackAI drops the cost of raising the fifth correction to one highlight and one note — same as the first — so all five actually make it into the message.

For one correction, type it. For five, paste them.