How do I give ChatGPT enough context to get accurate and detailed responses?

The fastest way to think about context is to treat ChatGPT like a capable new colleague on their first day: smart, but knowing nothing about your situation. Give it the same briefing you would give them. That means the background of the task, who the output is for, what you are trying to achieve, and any material it should work from. The single biggest upgrade most people can make is pasting the actual thing, the real email thread, the real data sample, the real draft, instead of describing it from memory.

Concrete examples carry more context than abstract descriptions. If you want writing in your voice, paste two or three samples of your writing rather than describing your style. If you want a specific format, show one example of the format. Models are exceptional at pattern-matching from examples, and showing beats telling by a wide margin.

State your constraints and your non-assumptions explicitly. Tell it the audience's knowledge level, what has already been tried, what it must not do, and which parts of your input are fixed versus open to change. A prompt like 'do not change the pricing section, it is final' prevents an entire category of unwanted rewrites.

Finally, make the model do some of the work: end complex prompts with 'ask me up to three questions before you start if anything important is unclear'. This flips the failure mode. Instead of confidently producing the wrong thing, it surfaces the gaps you did not notice in your own brief, which is exactly what a good colleague would do.