Transcription
If you've ever spent hours using Claude to try and write a YouTube script faster, only to look at the clock and realize that this script actually took twice as long than if you just used your brain, well then listen up. Because the problem with using AI to help write scripts is not that it's not good enough yet. It's that you're not giving it enough context. So, having written the last eight videos on this channel with the help of Claude and having spent the last 3 months painstakingly training my own script writing tool, I'll show you the exact five documents you need to turn Claude from a forgetful assistant that gets on your nerves into a reliable script writing partner.
Now, before we talk about the first document, we have to cover the biggest mistake that some YouTubers are still making when it comes to AI. Now, I was surprised to find that a bunch of my students were still using Claude in an extremely siloed off way, shall we say? Basically starting a new chat every single time they wanted to write a script, having to explain who they were and what they wanted the AI to help them with. Now, I'm not going to overexplain this because I want to get into the documents, but the very first step here is to create a project. Now, if you haven't used projects before, it's literally the same as a normal chat in Claude, except it's going to allow you to preload every future chat with a very specific set of instructions and reference files, so you don't have to reexplain who you are and what you're trying to do every time you sit down to write. So, if you haven't already, head over to the top left, go to projects, and create a new one.
Okay, so now you've done that, it's time to start adding the documents and the instructions that are going to save you hours of frustrating rewrites on Claude. And this first document is going to help you fix AI's most annoying problem. Now, if you've used AI for any length of time, you'll know that it has those default words and structures that it always seems to fall into without you asking. It's not this massive hyphen. It's that scripts aren't just words on a page. They're the backbone of your content, the blueprint of your brand, and the bridge between you and your audience. Look, your viewers are becoming increasingly AI literate, so it's important that we eradicate this type of language where possible. That's why I created the anti-slop prompt. It is a detailed list of the most complained about words and structures that AI produces that really give away the fact that it's AI with explicit instructions telling Claude to avoid them at all costs. And by the way, you can get this along with every document I'm going to talk about in this video for free in the description. So download the anti-slop prompt and you're going to upload this as a file inside your Claude project. And with that plugged in, Claude is going to read this at the start of every conversation inside that project and avoid that type of language. Now, this is important, by the way. If you do download that prompt for free, check back every now and again because I'm constantly testing this prompt inside the AI script writing tool that I'm building. Running tests across different Claude models and basically sharing updates to this prompt whenever I manage to improve it, even just a little bit.
But Claude knowing how not to write is very different to understanding how to write, right? Which is why this next document teaches Claude the most important script writing principles it's going to need to help write retention-optimized scripts. To show you why this matters, if you go and ask Claude right now to write a script without any sort of YouTube-specific training, what you'll get is an incredibly flat structure. Maybe a bit of an intro, a few teaching points, and probably a big old summary at the end. The thing is AI is smart, but it doesn't intuitively understand how a YouTube script should be structured, especially compared to other types of writing. But this training document fixes that. It takes all the principles that I teach in these videos and across my whole business and distills the most important ones to help your Claude project understand the underlying structures that make a high-retention script. So upload the training doc into your project as a file and we're good to move on.
Okay, so at this point the two documents we have handle how Claude physically writes. The problem is we still haven't told this project what its actual job is. Now, I don't want this to get confusing, but the instructions we're going to give this project are kept inside this larger document. You'll find in the free download. It's called the script writing process prompts. Now, before we do anything else, I want you to upload that entire document to your Claude project. And you're going to see why this is helpful later on. So, at this stage, you should have the anti-slop prompt, the training documents, and now the script writing process prompts uploaded. You with me? Now, this process prompts document contains not only the instructions we're going to give to the project so it understands what its job is, but it's also going to help us produce the final two documents we're going to need, which we'll talk about later. So, once you've got that process prompts document uploaded, you can now read it directly inside Claude. So, click on it so you get the preview and scroll down to the project hierarchy instructions and you're going to copy and paste these directly into the instructions area of the project. So, where the first two documents essentially gave Claude the tools to do the job, now we've given it an actual job description, if you follow me.
But we still haven't solved one of the main problems that leads to endless rewrites when using AI. And that brings us on to our fourth document. Now, in the past, you might have started a new chat by giving Claude some examples of your writing and asking it to match that style in its outputs. But the problem with this is not only do you have to do this over and over in every single new chat, but there's no guarantee that Claude will pull out the same style and tone patterns each time. So, we're going to create a comprehensive style guide that you can tweak to perfection and which your project then has access to as a reference on every new chat. Now, because you already uploaded the process prompt document, you can literally just start a new chat inside this project and say, "Run the style guide creation prompt." And what it's going to do is take you through the process from there. You don't even need to think about it. It'll prompt you to feed Claude up to five of your existing scripts or transcripts from past videos, ideally ones that have performed well if you can. And what Claude is going to do is analyze those scripts to look for patterns. Now, you might be tempted to send it more than five scripts, but honestly, what I've learned since training my script writing app is that five is generally enough for it to learn your style pretty comprehensively. And any more than that, and it starts taking an average across too many examples, and the patterns just kind of get more vague each time, it actually starts to get worse. So, five is totally fine. Stick with that and it'll produce a really comprehensive style guide. And the best part, well, the prompt already instructs Claude to produce this as a document which you can then literally upload directly to your project from there. Now, look, it's AI at the end of the day. It's not going to be perfect, but that combination of having our no-go list from the anti-slop prompt we did at the start and a specific style guide trained on your voice, it's going to make writing with Claude just a hell of a lot more effective.
So, at this point, Claude knows its job. It has the tools to do it and it knows your voice, but it's still missing one crucial document that's going to make it feel like an actual team member who understands you and your channel. Now, one of the big problems I see with a lot of YouTubers I work with, regardless of their size, is a lack of focus, shall we say? Not that they can't concentrate, but that they don't have a clear focus on who their videos are designed for. Now, this is not the video to go into detail about this problem, but the point is every educational YouTuber must have a clear picture of who their videos are for. Not only because you'll build a more loyal audience when it's clear who your videos are designed to help, but because AI defaults to broad generic language at the very best of times. So, not giving it any specific information about who it's trying to appeal to is only going to make that problem worse. But, we're going to fix this now with our final document, which is quite simply an audience avatar. And like the style guide, we can create this directly from the process prompt document. Just create a new chat and ask it to run the audience avatar prompt. And the best part is this prompt will literally walk you through a bunch of questions to help you nail down who your audience is. So if you're worried that you don't really know how you would describe your ideal viewer, you'll be surprised how much easier it becomes when it's broken down into these simple questions like this. And when you're done, once again, it's going to turn this into a document for you, like it did with the style guide, ready for you to upload directly into your project.
Now, this project setup is a great starting point, but what if I told you we can actually ask Claude to improve itself over time, so each new script you write gets closer and closer to your style? Well, watch this video next where I'll walk you through how to do this using a simple prompt that you've actually already got inside your Claude project.