# Skeleton-of-Thought

> Skeleton-of-thought first asks the model for a brief outline of its answer, then expands each outline point in parallel, reducing end-to-end generation latency.

- Identifier: PTL-0035
- Category: Reasoning Elicitation
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/skeleton-of-thought/
- Introduced: 2023

## Description

Because the points are expanded independently, it suits list-like answers better than tightly sequential reasoning.

## Related terms

- [Parallelization](https://protologue.com/t/parallelization/)
- [Prompt Chaining](https://protologue.com/t/prompt-chaining/)

## Sources

- Ning et al. (2023). Skeleton-of-Thought: Prompting LLMs for Efficient Parallel Generation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15337

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Skeleton-of-Thought. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0035). https://protologue.com/t/skeleton-of-thought/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)