Talk it in from the truck, type it out
Lesson 5 of 6 · Brief it like a new acquisitions VA
1 · Learn the move · Constraints + negative instructions
Most of what you know about a tract you learn standing on it, and none of it survives the drive home. Dictation solves the capture problem and creates a new one: spoken notes are shapeless, and a model asked to 'clean this up' will smooth the uncertainty out of them. That is the wrong direction. The instruction that makes voice capture safe is to preserve hedges exactly - if you said 'looked like maybe a creek', it must not become 'creek along the eastern boundary'. Firmness added in transcription is the most invisible error in this whole workflow, because it arrives in your own voice.
Below is a raw voice note from a site visit. Organise it under headings. Preserve every hedge exactly as I said it - 'looked like', 'maybe', 'I think', 'could not tell' all stay. Never upgrade an uncertain observation into a fact. Anything I clearly did not observe reads [NOT OBSERVED].
2 · Your turn. You write the prompt
You walked a tract for forty minutes and dictated six minutes of rambling notes on the drive back. Write the prompt that turns them into something filed and searchable without making you sound more certain than you were.
Remember: the AI sees only your prompt, not this page. If the situation isn't in your prompt, it doesn't exist.
Optional. These shape the output when you run your prompt below, not your score.