Services and Facilities

Draft Coach

Find out more about the Turnitin Draft Coach plugin for Microsoft Word that can help with citation, grammar and similarity checking.

About Turnitin Draft Coach

All RGU students and staff have access to Turnitin Draft Coach. This is a tool which is accessed within the online version of Microsoft Word and will support you with your academic writing. The tool offers support in three areas:

  • Similarity and avoiding unintentional plagiarism: check for matches with Turnitin's collection of internet content, student papers and academic journals before submitting your work.
  • Citations: identify any missing citations and references.
  • Grammar: detect and get advice on potential grammatical errors

Full guidance on accessing and using Turnitin Draft Coach can be found on the Study Skills Moodle site.

Support for accesssing and using Draft Coach

How to access Draft Coach

Draft Coach is accessed from the toolbar on the Office365 online version of Microsoft Word. You should see the Draft Coach plugin on the toolbar.


Screenshot

Please note that you must be using the online version of Microsoft Word and you must be logged-in with your RGU username and password.

The Study Skills Moodle site contains a step-by-step guide and video showing how to access Draft Coach. This includes troubleshooting for some commonly encountered Draft Coach access issues.

If Draft Coach does not appear on the Word menu please contact the IT Helpdesk for advice.

Get help with the Grammar, Similarity or Citation tools

Full guidance and videos showing how to use these tools are available on the Study Skills Moodle site.

If you have further queries about using the Draft Coach tools please use the following contact details:

Any other queries

For any other queries about using Draft Coach please contact Study Skills at studyskills@rgu.ac.uk

Draft Coach and RefWorks Citation Manager (RCM)

IMPORTANT - do not use Draft Coach in a file with RCM data unless you have first backed it up and created a copy

RCM is a streamlined version of RefWorks which you can open within Microsoft Word and add citations as you write. For more information on RCM and RefWorks see the Library's Referencing and Refworks guide.

It is important to note that RCM and Draft Coach do not work well together. They are both plugins for the online version of Microsoft Word but are provided by different companies. If you insert citations and references using RCM then proceed to run Draft Coach, this will turn your RCM references and citations to plain text, making them uneditable in RCM. There is no way to prevent this happening and the loss of RCM functionality for citations and references is permanent. If planning to use both RCM and Draft Coach we advise the following:

  • Regularly back-up and save copies of your work to avoid data loss
  • Use a copy of your file to run Draft Coach
  • Manually correct any issues identified by Draft Coach within the file with live RCM data.

For further advice on using Draft Coach in files with RCM please contact the Library at library.support@rgu.ac.uk