How Writer's A.I. Applies Style and Brand Guidelines at Scale

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Writer is now an official Superpath partner! Its A.I. writing platform offers a suite of features to power smarter, faster work. Superpath members can get 20% off enterprise plans—just let them know you came from Superpath. By the way, the following post was written with Writer. 🙂

Since the early days of the internet, companies have been trying to control how their brand is presented online. This has traditionally been a difficult task, as it requires constant vigilance and often manual intervention to ensure that content published by the company adheres to the brand guidelines.

This is where A.I. can help. By using A.I. to automatically enforce brand guidelines, companies can save a lot of time and effort. And because the A.I. can review new content before it is published, it can help to ensure that the content is consistent with the company's style guide. This works across web copy, content marketing and even social channels. Writer makes it easy to check copy in its interface or using an app likes its Chrome or Microsoft Word extension.

By using A.I. to automatically enforce brand guidelines, companies can save a lot of time and effort. And because the A.I. can review new content before it is published, it can help to ensure that the content is consistent with the company's style guide. Here's Writer CEO May Habib showing how it works.

May Habib: Hi everyone. I am May with Writer, and we are doing a series of tutorials with Jimmy from Superpath on what Writer can do for content marketing and content marketing workflows. Very excited to dive in.

Jimmy Daly: Okay, cool. Next up, we'll talk about style guides. Which honestly, to me, this is one of the most interesting, very practical use cases for AI because it's just sort of difficult to do manually. I mean, many teams do work with editors, which is great. Human editors are extremely helpful, especially when it comes to coaching writers along. But there's some little nitty gritty things they do, like adhering to brand guidelines, which are just sort of tedious and will be a lot easier to do automatically. So I've never actually seen this happen, but I'm super curious to see how it works.

May Habib: Yeah, Awesome, Jimmy. Absolutely. We are always amazed at just how many folks still have style guides that live in 90 page PDFs where the page looks like this, super dense and hard to parse. And unless you wrote it yourself, you probably don't know what's in it. So Writer takes those 90 pages and turns it into a very easy to use automated style guide. So first things first, we take those 90 pages, either we do it automatically for you or folks do it themselves, kind of go through our out of the box punctuation rules, our writing style rules, all of the things around readability and grade level. You get that in a Writer, and then anybody who's writing on behalf of the brand anywhere where they're writing gets those corrections automatically. So I'll give you an example. I'm here in G-Docs and, well, first I have a spelling mistake, so I will fix that-

Jimmy Daly: That was Writer too?

May Habib: That was Writer, yes.

Jimmy Daly: Okay. Yeah, yeah.

May Habib: So all of these underlines are our Writer. So actually we don't use white label, for example, as just an anti-racist stance that we and others have taken in tech. So all these underlyings you see here are Writer, and actually this 67 opens up even additional guidelines, so my viability-

Jimmy Daly: Sorry, didn't me cut you out. There's a few things happening here. One is grammatical corrections, like you spell a word wrong, it corrects it for you. The other white label, that's something that you've customized based on your brand guidelines?

May Habib: Yes, exactly. Things like introducing acronyms, we have customized based on our own writing guidelines. Things, actually, I have it pulled up because so many folks want to make sure that we catch things that are in their inclusive language guidelines, especially in tech, things like inclusive language automatically gets checked by Writer. Things that are more specific to how a company talks about itself, so one of our big things is Writer is the leading writing assistant is going to get flagged, we are a AI writing platform.

So all of that stuff gets derived out of your style guide from numbers to dates to terminology to writing style, and you can automate it anywhere where people are writing through these underlines. You can have a separate style guide by team. So a lot of our customers will have support and marketing and product share a set of terms, but actually have different writing styles. Marketing is writing in a way that is active and impactful. And sometimes support uses passive voice, for example, to not make the user feel bad about something that they did or bug that they found, et cetera. So little nuances that can all be automated with Writer.

Jimmy Daly: Really cool. Also, I love that it can happen in Google Docs and other places, which is where folks are doing this anyway. So, actually as you're writing you're adhering to a style guide as opposed to what I probably would do, which is just write it the way I think it should be written and then wait for an editor to fix it later, which is super, super inefficient.

May Habib: Totally.

Jimmy Daly: At a certain scale it becomes a mess.

May Habib: Yeah, totally. And the editor just doesn't want to be fixing the same things all the time. So that is definitely an under utilization of what they can bring to a company.

Jimmy Daly: Love it. Super cool. Okay, cool. Very interesting. So next up we're going to talk about how to set up and enforce taxonomy in your writing. So we'll jump to that and we'll see you over there.

Okay, cool. There you go. Thank you so much. May and your team over at Writer for being such a great partner to us at Superpath. You're building an awesome product. We really appreciate you spending time to help us get up and running with it. And frankly, your support is what helps us keep this community free, so we really are grateful for that. For those watching, if you do want to learn more and give Writer a try, go to writer.com. There's a couple of different plans you can choose from, there's also a free tier if you just want to kick the tires, so writer.com. Thanks so much for watching and thanks so much to the team at Writer for your support. Take care, everybody.

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