AI Prompting for Editors & Authors

2 x Half-Day Workshop Sessions (3 hours each, one 15 minute break)

For writing and editorial teams who produce published, reviewed and style-governed documents.

Summary:

A bespoke two-part workshop for people whose day is writing, editing and reviewing, covering responsible use, Copilot Chat, Copilot in Word, prompt engineering and the move from repeated tasks to AI agents. Session 1 builds the foundations and the rules, Session 2 is almost entirely practical, working through editorial use cases on the organisation’s own documents and style guide. Personalisation and agent design close the course, so teams leave with reusable behaviour rather than one-off prompts.

Course Breakdown:

Foundations & Responsible Use

• Introduction to Generative AI: the evolution of AI
• What an LLM is
• Hallucinations and how to avoid them
• Privacy and responsible AI use: chatbots versus Microsoft 365 Copilot
• The Microsoft Graph
• Staff guidelines
• Data protection
• Ethics

Copilot Chat & Copilot in Word

• Copilot Chat: where to find it
• The interface
• Work Mode and Web Mode
• Pages and Canvas
• Use case: blog drafting in AI Canvas from communication officer notes
• Copilot in Word: draft, ground, rewrite and re-tone
• Visualise, in document and in the chat pane
• Use case: executive summary using Edit Mode

Prompting

• Prompting through practice: the four essential parts of a prompt
• The four questions
• Golden tips
• 10 best practices
• How Gen AI reads prompts
• Use case: summarising text and documents

Editorial Workflows & Templates

• Tackling repeated tasks: prompt libraries
• Design and template limitations
• Template filling
• Track changes: the inbuilt options plus a document change tracker use case
• Practical editorial use cases: report editing against a house style guide
• Content tagging
• Metadata and titling
• Stakeholder communications
• Templates and structured reports: meeting minutes from a transcript
• Presentation content with speaker notes

Personalisation & AI Agents

• Personalisation: custom instructions
• Traits
• Memory
• When to use which
• From repeated tasks to AI agents: contextual prompting
• Advanced persona design
• Social media posts with a human in the loop
• Meta prompting
• Use case: a prompt improving agent
• Use case: grounded Q&A from a document
• Use case: an HR policy assistant agent

Appendix

• By request: Copilot in Excel

Outcome:

Participants will be able to draft, edit, summarise and re-tone documents with AI while keeping editorial control, apply their own house style through prompts and templates, and build reusable personas and agents so the same editorial standard is applied every time rather than re-explained on every task.