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Why does one short question turn into five paragraphs of hedging?
What you'll have at the end
A prompt template that reliably returns an answer under a set word limit
You need
A chatbot you can message directly, through its API or a chat window, and a question whose honest answer really is short, but the reply keeps arriving as several hedging paragraphs.
Not covered
Reshaping a reply's format, a table, a list, JSON, instead of trimming its word count is pinning to one output format, a separate fix from this one.
Leans on
Pin a chatbot to one output format
If the real problem is which shape the reply takes, a table, a list, JSON, rather than how many words it uses, pinning to one output format is the fix.
Audit a failing prompt against a checklist of common mistakes
If more than the length seems to be going wrong at once, a broader mistake checklist untangles which part is actually broken before you chase word counts alone.
Checked 15 Aug 2026
Part of the Prompt Engineering cookbook