Copilot in Word: rewrite modes and Coach

Drafting gets the demos; rewriting is where Copilot in Word earns its keep for people who already write competently. Select text, click the Copilot icon that appears, and you get a set of transformations that used to require a second pair of eyes — or a lot of time. This guide walks through what each mode really does, what the newer Coach mode adds, and how the whole thing sits alongside the older Editor feature that most tenants already have.

Select a sentence, paragraph, or a few pages, and the on-canvas Copilot menu offers:

Auto Rewrite. Copilot produces a handful of alternative phrasings of the selection, shown in a pane, and you choose one — or refine it with a follow-up. It preserves meaning and length reasonably well and is best for sentence- to paragraph-level polishing. On longer selections it drifts toward summarising, which is not what you asked for. Keep selections under a page.

Tone variants — the make it options: professional, casual, concise, imaginative, and similar. These are the same operation with a bias. "Concise" is the genuinely useful one: it cuts 20–30% without losing a point, which is a service to every reader you have. "Imaginative" is for marketing copy and produces exactly what you'd fear in a policy document. "Professional" mostly means passive voice and longer words; if your organisation writes in plain English, be careful with it.

Visualize as a Table. Select a list or a run of prose that's really structured data — "three vendors, each with cost, term, and notes" — and Copilot turns it into a Word table with sensible columns. This is the feature people don't discover and then use constantly. It works best on text that was already implicitly tabular; on ordinary prose it invents columns.

Custom prompts. The free-text box under the rewrite pane accepts anything: "turn this into three bullets," "write this for a customer rather than an engineer," "translate to Swedish," "add a sentence acknowledging the risk." This is the most powerful mode and the least visible.

Every result is a suggestion: Replace, Insert Below, or Regenerate. Nothing changes until you accept it, and accepting it does not go through Track Changes as a tracked edit unless tracking is already on — worth knowing in legal and policy teams where every edit is supposed to be visible.

Coach

Coach (sometimes surfaced as Get coaching) is a different kind of feature. Instead of rewriting your text, Copilot reads the selection and gives you feedback — on clarity, tone, structure, and reader impact — as commentary, leaving your words alone. It's the closest thing to "have a colleague read this" that a machine currently offers.

What it's good at:

Reader-centred feedback. "The main ask is buried in paragraph four" and "the tone reads as defensive" are the notes a good editor gives and Coach gives them reliably.
Structure. It notices when a document has no conclusion, or when the opening promises something the body doesn't deliver.
Audience mismatch. Tell it who the reader is and it'll flag jargon that reader won't know.

Where it's weaker:

Domain accuracy. Coach comments on writing, not facts. It will praise a beautifully written paragraph that's wrong.
Style-guide compliance. It doesn't know your house style unless you paste the rules into the prompt.
Long documents. It's most coherent on a section at a time. Whole-document coaching becomes a list of generic observations.

Coach is a relatively recent addition and Microsoft has been expanding it (it began in Outlook as Coaching by Copilot and grew into Word). Check that your channel has it before including it in training.

Rewrite versus Editor

Every Microsoft 365 tenant already has Editor — the spelling, grammar, and style checker with the underlined suggestions. It's rules-plus-ML, deterministic, fast, and it doesn't need a Copilot licence. Rewrite is generative: it proposes new sentences rather than corrections.

The right mental model:

Editor catches errors and style-guide violations. Run it always.
Rewrite changes how something reads. Use it deliberately, on selections.
Coach tells you whether the document works for its reader. Use it before sending anything that matters.

They don't conflict, but users conflate them, and the confusion produces tickets like "Copilot didn't fix my spelling." Editor's settings (formal/professional/casual writing style, inclusive-language checks) are also where organisational style enforcement lives — Copilot's rewrite has no equivalent policy knob.

Practical cautions

Meaning drift. Every rewrite is a paraphrase, and paraphrases lose nuance. A contract clause, a policy statement, or anything legally load-bearing should not be rewritten without a careful re-read. "Concise" in particular removes qualifiers — sometimes the qualifiers were the point.

Voice homogenisation. Rewrite an entire document paragraph by paragraph and it stops sounding like a person. Use it on the sentences that are actually bad, not on everything.

Accessibility and formatting. Rewrites are returned as plain paragraphs. Headings, list structures, and inline formatting inside the selection can be flattened. Rewrite the prose, then restore the structure.

Tracked changes. As noted: if reviewers need to see what Copilot changed, turn Track Changes on before accepting a rewrite. Otherwise the replacement is silent.

A sensible way to teach it

Show people three things: concise on a wordy email, Visualize as a Table on a list of options, and Coach on a document they're nervous about. Those three land immediately with almost every audience, and once someone has used Coach on a real document they'll find the rest on their own. Skip "imaginative" in the training deck — someone will use it on the security policy.