Review someone else's draft with AI — and send back Word comments, not a chat log

To review a Word document with AI and send back real comments, the AI has to anchor each comment to the words it is about, and you have to be the one who decides what is sent. In MindMax you say what the review is for, adopt the drafted comments you agree with in your own words, and export them into a copy of the .docx as ordinary Word comments.

The point of a review is not the opinion. It is an opinion the author can act on, on the sentence it is about, in the file they already work in.

Why a chat review takes all afternoon

Asking a chat assistant to review a document is fast. What comes back is a list: the argument in section 3 is weak, the evidence for the main claim is thin, a few terms are undefined. Then the real work starts:

1. Find the paragraph each point is about — and wonder whether it read that paragraph at all.
2. Throw out the points that are generic, wrong, or about a problem the draft does not have.
3. Rewrite the rest so they sound like a colleague and not a chatbot.
4. Open Word and add each one as a comment, on the right words, one at a time.

Steps 1 and 4 are clerical. Steps 2 and 3 are the review. A good tool should take the first kind off your hands and leave you all of the second.

How to do it in MindMax

1. Put the draft in your folder and open it. A .docx, or a Markdown or text file. If there is a checklist, reviewer guidelines or a brief the draft has to answer, save it in the same folder.

2. Say what the review is for. Choose AI → Review this document…. In the review settings, write a focus in a line — "check whether the cost estimate holds up and the rollout risks; ignore wording" — and, if you have one, pick the criteria document. The draft is checked against it point by point.

The focus decides where the comments concentrate, not what the AI is allowed to see. A serious problem outside it is still raised. That matters: the worst review is the one that answered the question it was asked and missed the hole in the middle of the argument.

3. Let it work. It reads the whole document, chapter by chapter, starting with the one you are reading. Each comment is written to the author and sits on the passage it is about, as one of five kinds:

• a flaw in the method, argument or design;
• an unsupported claim, naming what the evidence is missing;
• an alternative the author never ruled out;
• an unclear passage, where a reader cannot tell whether it is right;
• a strength worth keeping.

All but strengths are marked major — must be addressed before the conclusion stands — or minor. Most comments are minor; major has to be earned. A review memo follows: overall assessment, major issues, minor issues, strengths, and the questions the author should answer.

A Word file under review: a comment to the author, marked Major, waiting to be adopted or ignored.

4. Adopt, reword, ignore. On each comment, Adopt opens it with the AI's wording in place, for you to edit before it becomes your comment. Ignore the ones you disagree with. Select any passage to add the points only you would make — the ones that come from knowing the project, the field, or the person.

5. Export the reviewed copy. Export reviewed Word copy saves <name> - reviewed.docx next to the original. Tick the comments to include; optionally put the review memo at the top as an overall comment, and prefix comments with [Major], [Minor] or [Strength] so the author knows where to start. The original file is not touched, and any comments already in it are kept.

The author opens a Word file and finds comments in the margin, signed with your name. They do not need MindMax, and they do not need to know how you worked.

Whose words reach the author

Only yours. The comments in the reviewed copy are the ones you adopted, in the wording you kept, and the ones you wrote yourself. The AI's other drafts are not exported, and neither is anything you discussed with it while deciding. If you would not sign a comment, do not adopt it.

Where it goes wrong

• Confidential manuscripts. A review sends the document's text to the model you use. Many journals and funders do not allow submissions to be put into AI tools. Check first; with a model running on your own computer, the text does not leave it.
• PDF submissions. A PDF can be reviewed in MindMax, but the reviewed Word copy is made only from .docx, Markdown and text files. Ask the author for the source.
• Comments, not rewrites. The copy carries comments. Suggested wording goes inside a comment; nothing is changed in the author's text.
• Comments already in the file. They are kept, but the AI does not read or answer them.
• Repeated text. If the quoted words appear more than once, or are too short to place with confidence, the comment is listed with the reason instead of pinned to a guess. Add it by hand.
• It does not know your project. It will raise things you would not have and miss things only an insider would see. That is what the adopt step is for.

What is not claimed

This does not make the AI a reviewer. It makes the clerical half of reviewing — finding the sentence, drafting the first version of the comment, putting it in Word — cheap, so that your time goes to the half that needs you: deciding what is true and what is worth saying.

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AI document review · Review a colleague's draft, step by step · Download MindMax