Overview and Access

Overview

Draft Coach is a tool designed to help students improve their writing skills by providing real-time feedback and suggestions as you write, and directly to your Word document.

Draft Coach provides support through the following: three citation assistance, grammar checks, and similarity detection.

• The Grammar Guide identifies and corrects grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. It offers advice on improving the style and tone of your writing to make it more engaging and appropriate for your audience, and helps you make your writing clearer and more concise by suggesting ways to eliminate unnecessary words and phrases. It encourages you to correct grammar mistakes independently by providing detailed explanations. Its aim is for you to review and apply the feedback, so it does not automatically correct any of your writing.

• The Similarity Check compares your work against a vast database of sources. Any resulting text matches allow you to review and amend your writing, which supports you in avoiding any potential plagiarism.

• The Citations Check identifies matching pairs of citations and references in your text. It does not currently evaluate the accuracy of your citation format or check your text for missing citations or references.

Accessing Draft Coach

All University of Lincoln students have access to Office 365.  

Log in to Office 365 by visiting https://365.lincoln.ac.uk/.  On the home page, select the ‘App Launcher’ from the top left menu. From the pop-up box, select the Word app.

In Word, you can either open an existing document, or create a new one. ‘Turnitin’ will appear in the menu across the top. This may take a few moments to appear. Clicking on it will then display the ‘Draft Coach’ option just below the menu bar.

Click on this to open Draft Coach, which will then appear in a panel on the right. Should the message “Authentication Failed” appear, please press “Try Again”.

From this menu, select Similarity Check, Citations Check, or Grammar Guide from either the panels, or the horizontal menu across the top, then follow the prompts.