✦Use Claude Cowork

Write Documents

Draft, edit, format, and polish documents — from quick emails to detailed reports.

What's possible

  • Draft emails, memos, proposals, and reports from scratch
  • Edit existing documents for clarity, tone, and grammar
  • Convert between formats — notes to polished prose, bullets to paragraphs
  • Summarize long documents into key takeaways
  • Translate documents between languages
  • Create templates for recurring document types

Getting started

  1. 1

    Describe what you need

    Tell Claude what kind of document you want — an email, report, proposal, blog post, or anything else. Include the audience, tone, and key points.

  2. 2

    Provide context

    Upload reference materials, paste existing drafts, or share notes. The more context Claude has, the better the output.

  3. 3

    Review the draft

    Claude will produce a complete draft. Read through it and ask for changes — adjust tone, add sections, shorten paragraphs.

  4. 4

    Iterate until it's right

    Keep refining. Ask Claude to make it more concise, more formal, more conversational, or restructure sections.

  5. 5

    Export or copy

    Copy the final text into your document editor, or ask Cowork to save it as a file directly.

Example prompts

Starting from scratch

“Write a project proposal for migrating our team's file storage from Google Drive to SharePoint. Keep it under 2 pages. Audience is the IT director.”

Editing an existing draft

“Here's my draft of the quarterly update email. Make it more concise — cut it to about half the length while keeping all the key numbers.”

Format conversion

“Convert these meeting notes into a structured summary with action items, decisions made, and open questions.”

Tone adjustment

“Rewrite this customer complaint response to sound more empathetic and less corporate.”

Tips

  • Specify audience and tone upfront — “write for a technical audience in a professional but approachable tone” gets much better results than “write an email.”
  • Give Claude examples of your writing style if you want the output to match how you normally write.
  • Ask Claude to produce an outline first, then expand section by section. This works well for long documents.
  • For recurring documents (weekly updates, status reports), save your best prompt and reuse it each time.