Polished first drafts
Produce a real first draft of a memo, report, or letter from a brief and a template — clean enough to revise, not a starting point you have to throw away.
Intermediate training
Claude with Word
Drafting and revising real documents — memos, reports, letters, proposals — in your voice or someone else's, without leaving the AI-tell phrasing that makes a Claude-written draft obvious to the reader.
Start here
What you'll be able to do after this lesson
Revise in someone else's voice
Edit existing copy without losing the voice it was written in — yours, your manager's, the company's. Voice preservation is half of document work.
Real Word output
Produce .docx files that open cleanly, print right, match the template, and don't need anyone's manual cleanup before they go out.
Three document moves
Brief, revise, preserve
Brief-to-draft
The first draft is produced from a real brief. Audience, length, voice, key points, format. Skip the brief and Claude will guess — and the guess is usually generic, hedged, and tonally off.
Draft-to-revision
Revisions are surgical. "Tighten paragraph three. Cut the second sentence. Replace the closing with a question." Section-level edits preserve everything you already approved.
Voice preservation
The voice the reader expects is the voice the document needs to have. Yours, your manager's, the company's — never Claude's default, which has a recognizable AI flavor that subtly tells the reader the work was generated.
Trainer note: Word work goes wrong when employees skip the brief and let Claude guess.
Five minutes of brief-writing saves twenty minutes of cleanup — every time.
Where the work happens
Three surfaces, one workflow
Cowork with the .docx
The main surface for document work. Cowork opens the file, modifies sections, applies template formatting, and saves a real .docx that opens cleanly in Word.
Main surfaceChat for outline & tone
Before any prose exists, outline and tone are sorted in chat. What sections, what order, what voice. Discussions live in chat; the document lives in Cowork.
Outline firstA template in /Templates
The brand-voice or letterhead template that defines structure, fonts, and formatting. Point Claude at it — don't have Claude invent it.
Real templateDocument work
Five rules for drafts that don't need rebuilding
Start with a one-paragraph brief
Audience, length, voice sample reference, the three or four points the document has to make, the format the recipient expects. That's the whole brief — and it earns most of its time back in the first draft.
Supply a sample of the target voice
One real document in the target voice — your last good memo, your manager's last update, the company's published letter — beats a paragraph of describing what you want. Claude learns from examples faster than from adjectives.
Ask for an outline before the draft
For anything longer than a single email, get a numbered outline first. Approve the structure, then generate the prose. Restructuring after the fact is the most expensive editing pass.
Revise in sections, not the whole document
"Rewrite the second paragraph to be tighter" beats "rewrite the whole thing." Section-level revision keeps the parts that work and only touches what's broken.
Run a voice-and-tell pass before shipping
Last move before save-as-final: ask Claude to scan its own draft for AI tells, banned phrases, and voice mismatches. Treat the output as a checklist you read line by line.
Prompt upgrade
Weak prompt
Write me a memo on the new appraisal-gap policy.
Document-ready prompt
Work-ready prompt
(In Cowork.) Draft a one-page internal memo on the new appraisal-gap overlay. Audience: GMFS LO and processor teams. Voice: factual, friendly, no corporate filler — match my-voice-sample.docx in this folder. Key points: 1) what changed, 2) effective date, 3) what LOs do differently, 4) who to ask. Use the GMFS-memo-template.docx. Three short sections, fits one printed page.
Best patterns
Four document workflows that earn the time
Memo from notes
Rough bullet notes in, polished one-page memo out. Highest-volume document use case for most employees.
Long report from research
Outline pass first, section pass second, voice pass last. Long documents fail because the outline pass got skipped — fix that, and the rest converges fast.
Voice-matched letter or email-as-document
Real letterhead, real voice sample, single audience. Where a Claude-written draft is most likely to pass for human-written if the brief is right.
Revision of someone else's draft
"Here's the draft. Here's what's wrong with it. Rewrite, preserving everything I didn't flag." Surgical revision is more useful than re-drafts.
Document checks
Five things to verify on every draft
Employee rule: The AI-tell pass is non-optional. A document with two visible AI tells
tells the reader the work was generated — and that's a hit to your credibility that's hard to walk back.
Two minutes of voice editing saves the reputation cost.
Draft and revise
Six exercises to build document fluency
The fastest way to improve here is to read your own drafts back the way a careful reader would. The detector in this lesson is a starting point.
- Open the AI-tell detector in this lesson. Click each tell to see why it's a tell — then read your last Claude-written draft with those tells in mind.
- Write a memo from rough notes — your actual notes, not a hypothetical. Time the brief pass against the draft pass.
- Revise a draft someone else wrote (with permission). Preserve their voice while tightening the prose. Compare against your usual revision style.
- Produce a long-form document in two voices — your own and your manager's. Note which voice traits are hardest to preserve.
- Build a reusable document template for the documents you write most often. Future-you will reuse it weekly.
- Run an AI-tells pass on a draft you've already shipped. Note how many tells slipped past you — that's the calibration this exercise gives you.
Completion standard
You've finished this module when you can produce a first-draft .docx that's 80% shippable, revise in someone else's voice without losing it, and catch your own AI tells before a reader does.