Using suggestions
Writer suggestions offer real-time feedback on your writing, to ensure your content is accurate, polished, and aligned with your company's style and voice.
In this article
Accessing suggestions
Whenever you open up a document in Writer, you'll see a right sidebar containing Writer suggestions and feedback. In the top right corner is a score measuring how much you're complying with your company's style guide. A perfect score is 100. Below your score, you'll see a series of suggestions broken down by category, with a summary of your document's length and grade level at the bottom.
Accessing suggestions in Writer extensions
Most users access suggestions using an extension, so they don't have to open a new tab to receive feedback.
You can access suggestions in the following extensions:
- Writer for Chrome
- Writer for Edge
- Writer for Word
- Writer for Outlook
- Writer for Contentful
- Writer for Figma
No matter where you're working, you'll see suggestions organized into the same categories, and they'll all access the same style guide.
Types of suggestions
Spelling & grammar
These are pretty self-explanatory, but here are a few notes:
- Writer suggestions only support English-language documents. The colleagues in charge of your style guide can specify which version of English (American, Australian, etc) should apply.
- To proofread content in other languages, we recommend using Ask Writer and its multilingual capabilities.
Terms
Your company uses terms to manage, enforce, and share terminology which is specific to your company. There are four types of terms: Approved, Don’t use, Use carefully, and Pending.
✅ Approved terms (and their common mistakes): terms that are ok to use — they're part of your taxonomy (e.g., what you call a feature or service in your product) or word list (words you prefer writing a certain way, like Internet or email). Writer will highlight an Approved term in light blue.
❌ Don’t use terms: terms that your writers shouldn't use. These might be words that you've banned for compliance reasons, or because they're deprecated or extremely sensitive. Writer will highlight a Don't Use term in yellow, and if your colleagues have suggested an alternative, we'll offer the replacement as a suggestion.
⚠️ Use carefully terms: terms that you can use in certain, specific contexts. We'll flag any use of this term so you can double-check to see whether you're using it appropriately.
❔ Pending terms: terms that are waiting for sign-off from your team before they can officially be labeled as Approved, Don’t use or Use carefully.
Style
These suggestions reflect your company's preferences around things like how to format acronyms, using sentence case vs. title case, formatting dates or money
Clarity
Clarity suggestions usually involve the length of your sentences or the grade level of your content. Your admins can determine how simple your sentences should be. If you feel you're receiving clarity suggestions on too many of your sentences, reach out to your org or team admins – that may indicate that they've configured the reading level a little too low!
Delivery
Are you writing in a way that might come off as passive aggressive? Do you sound confident, or do you sound unsure? We'll flag sentences which might need a tone check.
Inclusivity
We’ve developed this feature in close partnership with customers who have been leading diversity and inclusion initiatives at their respective organizations. In keeping with the golden rule of “above all else, ask the person what they prefer,” we’ve also carefully considered guidance posted from communities themselves. You can read more here.
Compliance
If your team has configured compliance suggestions, we'll scan your content for things that look like sensitive information. Are you accidentally including a Social Security number or a bank account number? This is helpful if you work in a heavily-regulated industry.
Plagiarism
If your team turns on plagiarism suggestions, Writer will check whatever you're working on against the rest of the web.
Snippets
Snippets are simple, straightforward shortcuts for text that you reuse across your company. Snippets are a great way to save time and stay in compliance. Teams usually create snippets for referenceable text like a mission statement, an elevator pitch, or the branding language that marketing uses to describe a core product or feature. Snippets can also be used for email signatures, copyrights, and more. Get creative!
Reviewing suggestions
Accepting suggestions
Select a card to review the suggestion. If you want to accept the suggestion, select the green word to replace your original text with the suggested text. Your document score will increase after you accept a suggestion.
Rejecting suggestions
If you don't want to accept a suggestion, you can select the trash can to ignore it. Your original text will remain unchanged, and your document score will increase.
Flagging a suggestion
If you think a suggestion is incorrect, you can flag it. Flagging a comment will help our developers provide high-quality suggestions for you. We may share this information with your account admins, to let them know whether there are any aspects of your style guide that need to be adjusted.
When flagging a suggestion, you can choose to submit a comment.
Submitting a comment helps our developers and your account admins contextualize why a submission might be incorrect. Your comment can be up to 250 words in length.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my team receiving so many suggestions to break up sentences?
You may have set your readability level too low. Sometimes a low readability level is a good thing (especially if you do need your team's writing to be simple), but if your team finds itself ignoring these suggestions frequently, you may want to revisit the level you've configured.
What's included in your Inclusivity suggestions?
In keeping with the golden rule of “above all else, ask the person what they prefer,” we’ve also carefully considered guidance posted from communities themselves.
Resources on inclusive language:
- Writer Guide: Diversity and inclusion in the workplace
- National Center on Disability and Journalism
- The Diversity Style Guide
- GLAAD Media Reference Guide
Can I check content in languages besides English?
We only support suggestions in English, but you could use Ask Writer to check non-English content for simple spelling and grammar mistakes.
Can Writer suggestions follow specific formatting?
While Writer can apply powerful analysis to the content of a document, it doesn't analyze the formatting of a document.
- Bold and italics are supported in Writer, but aren't applied automatically via suggestions. You'll need to manually select the text you'd like to format and apply the formatting via the Formatting toolbar.
- Writer doesn't support headings or other styles, though these can be manually applied via the Formattin toolbar.
- Writer doesn't support line spacing adjustments.
- Writer suggestions aren't formatted into bulleted or numbered lists. You can manually arrange your document into bulleted or numbered lists using the Formatting toolbar.
- Writer doesn't support a Table of Contents feature. If you would like to add a Table of Contents to your document, you'll need to manually add the links and formatting using the Formatting toolbar.