Documents: drafts, edits and house style

A document from scratch takes hours. An AI draft plus your edits takes minutes. The difference is in how you place the order.

The draft: structure before prose

Don't ask for "write me a returns policy". Start here: "Draft the structure of a returns policy for an online shop: the sections and what goes in each." Fix the structure (that's quick) → then: "Now fill in sections 1–3, here are our terms: […]". Two steps get you a document built on your logic instead of a random one.

Editing what exists: surgical commands

• "Cut section 2 in half, keeping every condition intact"
• "Rewrite this for customers: drop the internal jargon"
• "Find the contradictions and ambiguities in this document" — an AI reviewer catches what your eye has stopped seeing
• "Run it against a checklist: are there deadlines, owners, exceptions?"

House style: few-shot, from the prompting course

Give it a sample: "Here's a typical proposal of ours: [text]. Write a proposal for client X in the same style and structure, here are the inputs: […]". The model will copy the tone, the structure and the turns of phrase — and your documents will stop looking like they came from three different companies.

Long documents: pick a model that reads them whole

For contracts and reports running to dozens of pages, choose a model with a big context window (remember the comparison course — Claude): "take the whole thing" works better than feeding it in chunks.

Practice

Take a real work document and run the "reviewer" over it: contradictions, jargon, what's missing. The result is usually sobering — and immediately useful.