When your organization or group sets a writing style that says “SOPs should be written this way,” AI cleanup follows that writing style’s phrasing and granularity to tidy up SOPs. This feature lines up SOPs, whose wording tends to vary by writer or department, to your organization’s standards.

A writing style is not something you write once and then forget. Decisions made on site, such as whether a suggestion was accepted or rejected in the pre-publish check, or whether an SOP was sent back during approval, are recorded, and the writing style grows day by day. For how it grows, see “Grow it from the records on site” below.

This “How to write it” setting is placed in the [Authoring rules] tab of [Dictionary / Templates], alongside Rules (What to follow) and Export format (Which form to export in). Its former name was “Procedure Authoring Policy.”

This feature is available to customers on the Enterprise plan.

What is “How to write it”?

This is a set of rules spelled out in words for how SOPs are written, set for each group. It consists of the following three parts.

• Phrasing / Writing style: rules for style and granularity, such as plain form or polite form, one action per step, and internal names for technical terms
• Prohibitions: expressions and phrasing you do not want used
• Common phrasing: phrases often used within your organization. They are automatically extracted from Sample procedures and can also be edited

The writing style you set is used as the standard for AI cleanup and the pre-publish check.

Set up “How to write it”

1. From the Group management screen, open the “How to write SOPs” panel for the target group (you can also open it from the [Authoring rules] tab in [Dictionary / Templates] → [How to write it])
2. Enter “Phrasing / Writing style,” “Prohibitions,” and “Common phrasing” (you can also use automatic generation from samples, described below)
3. Click [Save]

Generate a writing style from samples automatically

If putting it into words is hard, you can have AI generate the writing style from a sample SOP or manual file.

1. In the “Sample procedures” section, click [Add sample]
2. Choose how to add it
   • From file: PDFs, images, and other existing manuals
   • From Dive procedure: select an SOP that has already been created in your organization
3. After you register the sample, click [Generate a writing style from the samples], and AI will draft “Phrasing / Writing style,” “Prohibitions,” and “Common phrasing”
4. Check the generated result, edit it as needed, and then save

Apply “How to write it” to AI cleanup

In the AI processing options (video, file, photo), and in the “Text style” setting of the AI while editing an SOP, you can choose [How to write it] for teams that have a writing style set. (When you select several steps and proofread them together with [Proofread with generative AI], it is shown as [Follow the writing style].) When you choose it, AI cleanup tidies each step following the phrasing and granularity defined in the writing style.

Pre-publish check (review the SOP you are editing)

On the SOP editing screen, open the [More] menu to the right of [Publish], and then open [Pre-publish check]. You can check the SOP you are editing from the following seven perspectives. Because only the perspectives you open are run, you can check just the ones you want to see.

• What is decided: shows the purpose, readers, type, and scope decided in “AI consultation before you build”
• Rules: checks the SOP against the original text of the registered rule documents, reading them page by page, and points out issues with the source (rule name and page) and a quote from the original text
• How to write it: compares each step with the writing style
• Export format: checks whether the form fits the current content, and whether exporting in that form would drop any content
• Storage folder: shows folders that contain many similar SOPs
• Reason for publishing and summary: shows a draft of the reason and summary entered when requesting publication
• Tags: points out missing tags that should be added

If you decided the content in “AI consultation before you build” before writing the SOP, the check judges by the difference from what you decided. If there is no decided content, it judges by estimating from the contents of the SOP. The screen shows which method was used.

Please use this to review an SOP you have finished writing, or to check the quality of SOPs written by other authors.

Import from internal rules

If you have an internal rules file, you can also read its contents in from there. Open [Dictionary / Templates] → [Authoring rules] → [Rules]. You can read PDF, Word, and Excel files. You can register not only rule documents that set out how to write SOPs, but also rule documents that define the work itself, such as quality manuals and occupational safety and health rules.

1. Use [Add file] to add rule files to “Rules file.” You can add several related files at once
2. In “SOP types,” click [Extract from N rules files]. For each SOP type, the export format, Fields that must be written, and granularity are listed
3. Check the contents and confirm with [Save]. Neither adding nor removing files is confirmed until you press [Save]

If phrasing or prohibitions are found in the rules, you are asked “What do you want to do with the wording rules?” before saving. Choosing [Import into “How to write it”] adds them to this writing style. Importing only adds, and existing lines are not rewritten. Choosing [Confirm without importing] means that rule is not saved.

If you have multiple rule documents, the [Analyze] button in “Conflicts between rules” lists, with their sources, the provisions that conflict with each other. You can decide them one at a time with [Use this one], but you can also start using them without deciding. You can also choose on the spot when creating an SOP.

The rule documents you have read in are used as the basis for judgments when organizing before creating an SOP and in the pre-publish check. For detailed steps, see Reading the internal rules that serve as the basis for SOP judgments (Rules).

Grow it from the records on site

From daily records, such as whether issues were fixed or judged not needed in the pre-publish check, and the reasons an SOP was sent back in approval, update proposals can be created for both the writing style and how rule documents are read. Updates are made automatically on the server once a day. The records are stored only within that team, and the AI model itself is never trained or retrained on them.

Simply continuing the usual routine of creating, checking, and publishing SOPs gradually brings the writing style closer to the site. You do not need to set aside separate time to review the writing style.

The same setting also grows the Terminology Glossary from on-site records (Core plan or higher. For reference: Growing the Terminology Glossary from on-site records (term candidates and Extract from documents) ).

This is set in the admin settings under “Grow it from the records on site.” The owner only needs to choose one of the following.

• Update automatically (default): the update proposals created are applied as they are to the writing style and to how rule documents are read
• Do not update automatically (only offer proposals): nothing is applied automatically to either, and update proposals accumulate. You can review them and decide whether to adopt them

Only changes that add to the content are applied automatically. Adding lines to the writing style, adding required fields to the rule documents, and “Review the granularity” are done automatically, but removing a required field and rewriting existing lines in the writing style are always decided by a person. (A change that loosens the checks would not be noticed even if it is wrong, because it only reduces the number of warnings.) Changes applied automatically are also kept in the update history with their reasons, and can be returned to an earlier version. You can also create update proposals on the spot from [Generate proposals] in the “How to write it” panel.

For a group that does not yet have a writing style, the first version is created from published SOPs and registered rule documents.

View the update history and restore an earlier version

If you open “Update history” in the “How to write it” panel, each change is listed on one line, showing when, by whom, and what was changed. You can check the content at that point from [Details] on each line, and restore that version from there.

• Manual save: saved by a person. The name of the person who saved it is shown
• Auto-generated: from the daily automatic update. The updater is shown as “System”
• Restored: returned to a past version
• Start point: the content from before history recording began. If you want to return to the state before automatic updates were applied, select this

Sample procedures are also subject to history and restore. When you restore, the writing style and the samples at that save point are returned together.

Rule documents have the same update history. For rule documents, the rule files are also restored together.

Tips for using it well

• We recommend starting small in one group first, and rolling it out to other groups once operations are running smoothly
• For “Sample procedures,” we recommend that you choose an SOP that your organization can confidently call “this is the ideal”
• A generated writing style is only a draft. Please edit it to fit the actual situation, and then save

Related

• To import content from existing manuals, see Use AI Extract on Related files and reflect the results in the SOP
• To align variations in terms, see Align notation variations (Aliases in the Terminology Glossary)