Services and Facilities

Turnitin 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 is available to all RGU students and staff. Accessible via Word for the Web, this is a tool which will support your academic writing in three areas:

  • Similarity: avoid unintentional plagiarism by checking against 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.

Support for accesssing and using Draft Coach

How to access Draft Coach

The Draft Coach plugin can be accessed from Microsoft Word for the Web, via the toolbar. Please consult either the step-by-step guide, or video for a short demonstration on how to achieve this.


Screenshot

If Draft Coach does not appear on the Word menu:

  • Make sure that you are using Microsoft Word for the Web
  • Check that you are logged in with your RGU account
  • Re-enable pop-ups for Word for the Web

If none of these options work, please contact the IT Helpdesk for advice.

Using the Tools

The Study Skills team provides guidance on how to use the Similarity, Citations and Grammar tools within Turnitin DraftCoach.

If you have any further questions about DraftCoach, please contact:

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