Eight things that separate a good prompt from a vague one

The checker scans for the ingredients that reliably change an AI answer: enough context to work with, a stated role or perspective, a named audience, a requested output format, an example of what good looks like, at least one constraint, a stated purpose, and instruction shaped writing rather than search keywords.

None of these are magic words. They work because a language model produces the most likely continuation of what you gave it, so a prompt that already looks like the front half of a good answer gets a better second half. How to write a good prompt explains the reasoning, and common prompt mistakes covers what to stop doing.

What a checklist cannot judge

It cannot tell whether your prompt is true, whether the task suits an AI assistant at all, or whether the answer you get back is correct. A perfectly structured prompt about a subject the model has no reliable knowledge of will produce a perfectly structured wrong answer, which is the failure mode described in AI hallucinations.