# Standard Prompts

We have tried a very simple prompt above. A standard prompt has the following format:

```
<Question>?
```
 
This can be formatted into a QA format, which is standard in a lot of QA dataset, as follows:

```
Q: <Question>?
A: 
```

Given the standard format above, one popular and effective technique to prompting is referred to as few-shot prompting where we provide exemplars. Few-shot prompts can be formatted as follows:

```
<Question>?
<Answer>

<Question>?
<Answer>

<Question>?
<Answer>

<Question>?

```


And you can already guess that its QA format version would look like this:

```
Q: <Question>?
A: <Answer>

Q: <Question>?
A: <Answer>

Q: <Question>?
A: <Answer>

Q: <Question>?
A:
```

Keep in mind that it's not required to use QA format. The format depends on the task at hand. For instance, you can perform a simple classification task and give exemplars that demonstrate the task as follows:

*Prompt:*
```
This is awesome! // Positive
This is bad! // Negative
Wow that movie was rad! // Positive
What a horrible show! //
```

*Output:*
```
Negative
```

Few-shot prompts enable in-context learning which is the ability of language models to learn tasks given only a few examples. We will see more of this in action in the upcoming guides.