From ideation to outline & coaching

Ideation is where a document starts to take shape, but what happens there does not stay there — two things it gathers, the Emerging Brief and the Emerging Outline, feed the rest of your workflow. This page explains what each term means and exactly where it goes, so nothing about that flow is invisible.

The five terms, kept straight

• Project Brief — the brief shared across the whole project — its topic, audience, and purpose apply to every document.
• Document Brief — a brief for one document, layered on top of the Project Brief. This is what the outline and coaching actually read.
• Emerging Brief — ideation’s draft of the Document Brief. It gathers in the panel beside the chat as you talk, and stays a draft until you save it.
• Emerging Outline — ideation’s rough, free-text outline for the document. It is separate from the structured Outline below and is used as context when you generate one.
• Outline (sections) — the structured list of sections — each a title and a purpose — that you build on the Outline surface. This is not the same as the Emerging Outline.

Where each one goes

• Emerging Brief → Document Brief — when the Emerging Brief looks right, “Save to document brief” promotes it into the Document Brief. Until you do, it is only a draft — the panel shows whether it has been saved yet.
• Document Brief → Outline & coaching — the Document Brief (merged with the Project Brief) is what outline generation, re-evaluation, and coaching read. So saving your Emerging Brief is what makes it inform those results.
• Emerging Outline → outline generation — when you generate or re-evaluate an outline, ideation’s Emerging Outline is read directly as context — alongside the brief — even though it is separate from the structured sections.