An operations analyst uploads twelve incident reports and asks Claude, "Summarize these." The COO needs to decide by Friday whether to fund a new monitoring tool, but the summary that comes back is a long narrative of each incident. What is the most appropriate way to improve the prompt?

Answer: C — Say the brief is for the COO's funding decision and ask for one page on recurring causes, how often each occurred and what monitoring would have caught.

The output missed because the prompt never said what the summary was for, who would read it or what shape it should take. Option (c) supplies the goal, audience and format, which is what was missing. (a) adds tone adjectives but still doesn't say what decision the summary supports. (b) assumes capability is the problem; a stronger model would still not know the purpose. (d) abandons a task Claude can do well once properly briefed.