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Improving your writing with Draft Companion

With Draft Companion, you can quickly get suggestions and incorporate them into your draft content without leaving Draft Space.

Before you begin

Draft Companion is an optional feature of Draft Space. To be able to use Draft Companion, the feature must have been enabled in your implementation of Tridion Docs.

About this task

Draft Companion is an easy-to-use tool for improving content, available from Draft Space's sidebar. Based on your prompts, Draft Companion analyzes selected text and provides suggestions to enhance clarity, engagement, and comprehension.

Draft Companion is able to make suggestions for transforming and improving text, or even generating completely new text, using its powerful AI capabilities. To do its work, Draft Companion needs two things from you:

  1. A selection of existing text, that is what you want Draft Companion to improve
  2. A prompt, that is a request that describes how you want the text transformed

From these two things, Draft Companion is able to use its vast source of language knowledge to generate a suggestion, which you can use or not use, as you like.

Draft Companion provides suggestions in a conversation thread that starts with some selected text and then continues with that selection as the conversation's context for as long as the text remains selected. Once you apply a suggestion or change the selected text, the current conversation thread ends and Draft Companion starts a new thread for the next selection.

One thing to keep in mind as you start with Draft Companion is that all Draft Companion suggestions are text only. When working with DITA, this fact has the following implications:
  • The suggestions will not keep any inline DITA elements that exist in the original selection. This includes markup for formatting and inline images.
  • When you select content that spans blocks of content of different types, such as both a paragraph and a bulleted list, the resulting suggestion will not retain the same structure.

As you use Draft Companion you will learn from experience what works most effectively in different situations. This task will guide you through the overall process and help you get started.

Procedure

  1. Open the document in Draft Space.
  2. In the sidebar, select the Draft Companion.
  3. In an editable topic, select some content that you want to improve.
    The following are some tips for selecting content:
    • To quickly select a block of text, such as a paragraph or a bulleted list item, you can select the corresponding element node in the footer area or triple-click somewhere inside the text block.
    • If you don't want to alter the DITA structure, select a single DITA block element, such as a single paragraph of a single bulleted list item.
    • Some prompts work best when you select enough content to provide adequate context.
    • If you have external content that you want to use as input in the document, first copy and paste it into the desired location then select it.
  4. Get suggestions using any (or a combination of) the following methods:
    How do I enter a prompt?Guidelines
    Click on the predefined promptsDraft Companion comes with the following predefined prompts:
    • Improve readability — This prompt aims to produce more readable text, specifically text that is optimized to achieve a higher readability score. The goals for this prompt include (but are not limited to) clear, concise wording and sentence structure, active rather than passive voice, and terminology familiar to the intended audience.

      After using this option, you'll see the readability score for the suggested revision, as well as the score of the previous version.

    • Fix grammar and punctuation — This prompt generates a suggestion that remains basically the same other than fixing errors in grammar, spelling and punctuation.
    • Summarize — This prompt tries to capture the key points of the selected text in a more concise, summarized version. The prompt works best when you select a larger amount of text, such as a few paragraphs or even the entire topic. Note, however, that there may be a limit to how much content you can select and the DITA structure will not be retained in the summary.
    • Try again — This prompt generates a new suggestion with the same objectives but with alternative wording.
    Type a custom promptIn the empty field, type instructions that tell Draft Companion how you want to transform the current selected text. In your prompts:
    • Be as precise a possible.
    • Include information that can help clarify the context.
    • Specify any restrictions, such as a limit on the number of words.
  5. After getting a suggestion, you can decide how to proceed, such as to use the suggestion as is or to keep trying. Suggestions are never applied automatically and you have several options.

    The following table describes the various options you have at this stage.

    What do you want to do?Guidelines and steps
    Are you happy with the current suggestion?If the current suggestion works well for your needs, you can use either of the following options for incorporating it into the draft:
    • Click the Apply button to apply the suggestion to the selection, replacing the existing text with the full text in the suggestion. To ensure that the DITA structure remains intact, the Apply button is available only when the selection is within a single DITA element.
    • Click the (Copy) button to copy the suggestion to your clipboard so that you can paste in any location that you want.
    Is the current suggestion good, but could be a bit better?

    Enter additional prompts (the same way you did previously) to make some adjustments, such as to the length of the suggestion or the tone of voice that is used.

    For example:
    • If the suggestion was too long, you could enter a custom prompt to "Make it shorter" or perhaps to enforce a maximum length, you could say "or "Shorten it to a maximum of 15 words."
    • If the suggestion is too formal in tone, you could enter the prompt to "Make it friendlier".
    Do you want to go back to an earlier suggestion?

    Click Back here (Back here) to return to an earlier suggestion in the chat, making it the active suggestion.

    This option is especially useful if you have gone through several iterations and applied multiple prompts, but then realize that you actually like an earlier suggestion the best. You can then use this earlier suggestion in your content or you can use it as the new starting place from which to apply additional prompts.

    Do you want to go back to the original text and start over?From the pane's More actions(More actions) menu, select Clear chat history.

    This option is useful when you have gone through several iterations, but nothing is quite working and you want to start over.

  6. To make more improvements to the draft topic, repeat steps 3 to 5, as needed.
  7. When you are satisfied with the changes to the current topic, save your changes to that topic. If you have made changes to several topics, be sure to save all changes to the document.