Work with suggestions
The five tabs, what each category means, how to read a card, and the difference between rejecting and ignoring.
Everything the review found arrives as a suggestion card in the sidebar. Each card is one finding about one passage, with a proposed change and the reason for it.
The five tabs
| Tab | What lands here |
|---|---|
| All | Every finding, in document order |
| Style | Active voice, conciseness, fresh language, inclusive language, legalese, persuasiveness, punchiness, tips and models |
| Clarity | Clarity, elegance, flow, logical comparisons, parallelism, precision |
| Proofing | Agreement, commonly confused words, consistency, drafting, formatting, idioms, legal conventions, punctuation, tech terms, usage, verb form, word choice |
| Citations | Citation-format corrections and phantom citations |
The tab badge counts what is in it. A spinner on a tab means that stage is still running: Proofing spins while the consistency pass finishes, Citations while citation extraction or a RealityCheck run is in flight.
Consistency is deliberately part of Proofing rather than a tab of its own — it is a proofing concern, and splitting it out would scatter one reviewer’s attention across two places.
These are the same groupings the Word add-in uses, so a document reviewed in Word and the same document reviewed on the web sort the same way.
Reading a card
A card carries five things:
- The category badge — Style, Clarity, Conciseness, Passive Voice, Redundancy, Consistency, Citation, Phantom Citation, or Other. The card’s left edge is color-coded to match.
- The original text, marked in red.
- The suggested text, marked in green.
- The explanation — why BriefCatch thinks the change is an improvement, sometimes with alternatives you can pick between.
- The actions.
Selecting a collapsed card expands it and moves focus to the matching passage in the document, so you can see the sentence in context before deciding. Arrow keys move between cards; Enter opens one.
Phantom citations
A phantom citation is a citation that does not appear to correspond to a real authority. It shows up as a suggestion card on the Citations tab rather than as a formatting correction, because the problem is not the format. Treat it as a prompt to go and check the source.
Deciding
Accept
Applies the proposed change to the document. Where a suggestion offers alternatives, you pick which one to apply with Accept with this correction.
Reject
Records that you looked at it and chose not to apply it. The suggestion counts as handled.
Ignore
Hides this occurrence only. Nothing is recorded about the rule.
Ignore in all docs
Suppresses that rule for your account, in this document and future ones.
Rejecting and ignoring are not the same thing, and the difference outlives this document. A rejection is a decision about one passage. An “ignore in all docs” is a standing instruction that changes what BriefCatch shows you from now on — which is powerful when a rule genuinely does not fit how you write, and quietly costly when you clicked it to clear a card.
Show ignored lists what you have suppressed and lets you restore any of it. If BriefCatch seems to have stopped flagging something it used to flag, look there first.
Accepting or rejecting advances review progress. Ignoring does not: an ignored item is removed from view rather than resolved.
Working in bulk
Selecting several cards reveals the bulk bar. Accept All applies everything in the current view, and Express Editing applies all suggestions in the view in one pass.
Read the confirmation dialog before either. A bulk action can rewrite many passages at once, and the scope is the current tab and filter — not the whole document — so what “all” means depends on where you are standing. If the document already carries tracked changes, confirm that the resulting change history is what your review workflow expects before you accept in bulk.
Anchoring
A suggestion points at a specific passage. If you edit that passage substantially, BriefCatch may no longer be able to anchor the suggestion to it, and the card can no longer be applied. Re-analyze the document to get findings that match the current text. See Review a document.
Feedback
Give feedback on a card reports whether a suggestion was useful. It goes to the team that tunes the rules, and it is the most direct way to change what the engine does with a pattern you keep rejecting.
Related
- Citation formatting is its own workflow: Correct citation format.
- Whether an authority actually supports the proposition is a different question, answered by RealityCheck.
- The document-level view is in Reports.