Sue Littleford
Draftsmith “is a boon to writers, refining their original text through a series of drafts.”
Copyeditor of scholarly humanities and social sciences books and journals; producer of style guides; Advanced Professional Member of the CIEP; northerner in Berkshire.
Originally published on Apt Words
Draftsmith: a new targeted AI tool for writers and editors
Most editors have heard of PerfectIt, https://intelligentediting.com/ Intelligent Editing’s Word add-on consistency checker; many of us wouldn’t be without it.
From the same stable, headed by Intelligent Editing’s founder Daniel Heuman, now comes an AI-based tool for writers: Draftsmith.
Draftsmith’s purpose is to help you move your own original first draft along through the revision stages of writing, until you have refined and polished text.
But I can tell you that there are some nifty functions in Draftsmith that will help editors, too.
I’ve been lucky to be given both a sneak preview at the annual Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading’s https://ciep.uk 2023 conference and early access to have a play, draw some conclusions and write this review.
Now, like so many, I’ve been horrified by the egregious errors that have had generative AI apps such as ChatGPT hitting the headlines. I have deep reservations, to put it mildly. https://aptwords.co.uk/generative-ai/ But this isn’t that. Intelligent Editing have approached the use of this AI with ethics and security very much in mind.
Let’s get the awkwardness and potential reasons for resistance out of the way.
Like PerfectIt, Draftsmith is a Word add-on. The AI used is Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service – generative AI.
However, within the app it won’t create brand-new text for you out of nowhere (so no issues with ChatGPT’s potentially disastrous hallucinations). It’s a tool that works with pre-existing text to make a range of targeted improvements. You still have work to do. It doesn’t take over and present you with a big wodge of new text that you might be tempted to simply adopt and use.
There’s brief loading of content into the cloud: the sentence being worked on is uploaded to the cloud, and is quickly deleted when you move on – usually within a handful of seconds. The entire document isn’t uploaded, and there’s no longer-term storage.
Intelligent Editing don’t use any of your text to train AI. Intellectual property rights are respected.
Draftsmith works in Windows, Mac OS, and iPad (iPadOS) – and, unlike PerfectIt, the product is the same on each platform. Compatibility with Word Online (the browser-based version) is in the works.
What Draftsmith is
Draftsmith is a tool that lives on the ribbon of your copy of Word. When you launch it, it works through the text sentence by sentence (or you can point it at the problem bit of text). For each sentence, it makes suggestions for improvements that you accept or decline – or fiddle with, if it was nearly right.
So you write the original text, and Draftsmith helps you refine it with various targets in mind.
What does Draftsmith do?
There’s a handy minute-and-a-half video that the Draftsmith team put together to summarise its functions. https://draftsmith.ai/draftsmith-video
When you’ve installed and launched Draftsmith, you can use the ribbon or a menu pane to choose what you want to achieve. The menu pane looks like this:
These are the main groups of improvements you can make to your text to move from first draft to refined, polished and ready.
The Draftsmith website explains these functions, https://draftsmith.ai/what-it-does so I’m not going to give an exhaustive run-down of them here. But I’m certainly going to give you a flavour of my favourite tools!
Draftsmith’s tools include:
Simplifying English text, including, in the Readability Tuner, options for plain English, simplified English (not the same thing), and reading ages of 8, 11 or 13 years, high school or college, and there’s a translation to English button, too.
Nudging your style – more friendly, more exciting, more professional, more formal, more empathetic.
Reducing word count.
Basic editing – typos, shortening sentences, change passive voice to active voice (not that passive doesn’t have a perfectly sensible place in written text, but if you’re writing something like instructions, then active is what you want).
Fixing dictated and OCR (optical character recognition) texts.
And you can make your text happier, or – joy! – be all geared up for Talk Like a Pirate Day, May the Fourth, Tolkien Reading Day and Shakespeare Day – perfect for your socials!
There’s a handy Replace Text button so you don’t even have to copy and paste.
Who Draftsmith is for – editors
During development, Intelligent Editing realised that editors will find some of the functions distinctly handy – not for all the jobs all the time, but some tricksy [DH2] areas of an edit may be rather easier with Draftsmith.
The fluency enhancer can be a real help when working with multi-literate authors, or translated text. Draftsmith will examine the sentence and give you another view of what the intention for that sentence may have been. You, as the human being, remain the one to make that call, but when you’re facing text that frequently challenges you to understand the author’s intent, just having another viewpoint can be exactly what you need to cut through the ‘been-staring-at-this-too-long’ problem.
The word count function is very effective – it was one of the functions that most impressed me. If you’re tasked with cutting for length, this will definitely make your life a bit easier.
The simplification of the English is a really good tool – and again, it can relieve some of the mental strain that quickly builds up when you have a mountain of text to detangle.
Daniel Heuman was very clear when I spoke to him about Draftsmith a couple of days before the launch – he doesn’t expect that all editors will need to use the app all the time, but he can envisage an editor needing it for a particular job, and this is what drove the decision to offer a monthly pricing option – you can buy a month’s worth of Draftsmith and then bow out until the next time, without being tied into a subscription you only use intermittently.
If you’re tracking your changes, have Word’s Track Changes turned on, and choose either the Simple Markup or No Markup option. When you import a suggestion from Draftsmith by clicking on the Replace Text button, Word will track it. You can switch straight back to All Markup if that’s how you like to work – but don’t keep that view whilst you’re clicking that Replace Text button as you’ll be sadly disappointed!
If you’re peering at the suggestion box wondering what the change actually is (if you’re anything like me at the end of a long day), check the Show Changes box in the Draftsmith pane for a look-alike tracked changes view.
As Daniel Heuman explained to me, Intelligent Editing see their new app as another tool in the editor’s toolbox – nothing more, nothing less.
Who Draftsmith is for – writers
A huge number of people are not confident writers. There’s lots for people to struggle with – getting the tone right, making things short enough without losing the meaning, getting the text right for various reading levels.
That last one is particularly important if you’re writing for public consumption, say, an information leaflet or some instructions. No one ever complained that something was too easy to understand!
When you want to make your writing as clear as possible, Draftsmith is able to help you.
What did I think of Draftsmith?
I tried all the tools out on a blog post I’d just written and wasn’t yet ready to publish. And, I have to say, if you’re an experienced and confident writer, very clear about your audience, and the goals of your writing, it’s not going to be huge help – for that, I use PerfectIt for my own writing as well as checking over text I’ve edited in my day job as a copyeditor. (Oh, and if you’ve been wondering, PerfectIt doesn’t use AI and that’s not changing.)
What’s exciting, though, is that as Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI itself improves, Draftsmith will become stronger and stronger, and we’ve all seen how fast AI technology is moving.
However, if I needed to write in a style that isn’t my usual one, I can see that some of Draftsmith’s tools would become very helpful. I may not accept every suggestion, but it would stir up ideas for me to work with.
But the next time I get an abstract that’s over the word count allowed by the journal, I shall be leaping on the Word Count Trimmer for a little assistance!
A warning
There is one annoyance, but Intelligent Editing are working on it: Draftsmith is stuck, for now, with US English. So users – writers and editors alike – will need to be alert for US spellings cropping up in suggestions for replacement text.
Once you poke under the hood of how to identify a regional variant of a language, when there are huge overlaps between those variants, the complexity of getting AI to understand the different versions becomes apparent.
I’m looking forward to seeing how Intelligent Editing tackle this!
My verdict
With a first short foray into Draftsmith’s functionality, I’d say it’s a boon to writers, refining their original text through a series of drafts.
It’s also a boon for editors, though perhaps in a slightly more limited way.
If you’re writing or editing for an audience, especially if it’s outside your usual one, the reading levels will be invaluable, as will the styles of simplified, plain, professional or formal English.
Draftsmith is a tool wielded by humans. The human being stays front and centre, deciding what aspects to use, and deciding whether the suggestions are an improvement or not, and to be adopted or not, and whether the suggestions are nearly there and doing their own further adjustments.
I’ve had suggestions that have changed the meaning – so you certainly don’t want to sit there just clicking on the Replace Text button over and over. AI can’t read your mind, it doesn’t know your intentions and it has no idea who your audience is.
Natural language AI is still beefed-up predictive text.
However, AI’s results do vary according to the quality of the prompts the human user gives it. Draftsmith provides honed ready-made prompts hiding behind the menu buttons to give you the best results that Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service is currently capable of.
AI is developing rapidly – who knows where we’ll be in a year?
Will I use it? Yes, from time to time in my editing work. PerfectIt is invaluable to me, and I use it on every job. I can certainly anticipate that particular projects will also benefit from some ideas from Draftsmith. Text written by people for whom English isn’t their main language can sometimes be difficult to parse – Draftsmith can help me work out the intended meaning, or at least give me another option to put to the author.
For my writing? My audience tends to be steady – other editors, scholars and the like, but when I’ve written too long a blog post and I’m bored of glaring at it, trying to figure out where I can cut those last few words that just won’t reveal themselves – Draftsmith will be a fresh pair of eyes for me.
But Draftsmith would be a huge help if I was, say, asked to write an introduction for schoolchildren to the career of copyediting. The simplifying English functions were particularly impressive. I’m aware how, er, indirect some of my early drafting can be. Draftsmith pares it down, simplifies the grammar and makes the message shine out.
Availability
Draftsmith is available for a subscription of $18 + VAT per month from Thursday, 7 December 2023. If you pay by the year, it’s $120 + VAT. https://app.draftsmith.ai/ (The page opens on the annual option – switch to the monthly view if that’s what you’re interested in.)
Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading members get 20% off. Log into the members’ area of the Institute’s website and check out the members’ benefits section.
A free 7-day trial (max 25 sentences per day) is available before you commit yourself to your first month. https://draftsmith.ai/free-trial