ShortlyAI Commands: The “Refine” Collection

Learn about the refine commands in ShortyAI and how to use them to improve your writing speed.

In many ways, this post is late to the table. ShortlyAI released these /commands I'm calling the "refine" collection probably two-three weeks ago. But better late than never right? I want to explain them in a little detail to help you make the most of them.

ShortlyAI's minimal interface is one of its biggest strengths. Making it simple to jump in and write -- calling on the AI when you need it. Then you can use these /commands when you need more advanced power. In this case, the power to better refine your article.

YouTube video

What is Context?

You'll see me refer to "context" when discussing these /commands. I have a whole guide for understanding context in Shortly, check that out for more detail. But in a nutshell, Shortly has to send something to GPT-3 in order for it to return text.

By default, Shortly will use the article brief, the headline, and all the content above the current cursor location -- except in /commands.

Context in /commands

Look here for a more in-depth discussion of context when writing in Shortly. For this guide, I'm only referring to the context within the /commands themselves.

Inside of a /command you'll see square brackets like this []. Anything you put inside of these brackets is the only context used within the /commands (at least, these three "refine" commands -- which, as of this writing are the only ones).

This means you could be right in the middle of a long article and your /commands won't be affected by the content above them -- like "write for me" is.

Alright, that's context -- let's go over the commands.

The "Refine" Collection of Commands

This "refine" collection complements Shortly's "write for me" feature by allowing you to tweak sentences, improve the flow of your writing, and even add to it -- when you need more control over the context.

These commands are aptly named and do precisely what you think they do.

/shorten

This will shorten your text in an attempt to rewrite it in a more concise way. Useful when you have something "fluffy" you want to condense. Important because word count doesn't mean much when many of the words aren't contributing toward the reader's goal for being on your article in the first place.

/rewrite

This will simply rewrite your text to bring you a new way of seeing it. This can be helpful when the sentence fits, but has some awkwardness to it. Maybe some words don't seem to fit quite right, or how it relays the message could be better.

/expand

This will take the text you feed it and expand upon it to give you more content about the topic you fed the command. It's a way to add more "meat" to a paragraph without the AI becoming confused by all the rest of the content in your article.

Those are the commands in a nutshell. Now let's see how they look in action. To do this, please watch the video at the top of this article.

In the video I'll show the commands and a quick example of how I might use them when writing with ShortlyAI.

Hope you found this helpful. Take care!