Selection Menu

Written By Michael Stewart

Last updated 9 months ago

Selection Menu

One of the most powerful tools on Sudowrite is hidden until you highlight something—and it’s called the Selection Menu.

This smart menu will appear, hovering over your document, once you’ve selected text. It will change based on what exactly you’ve highlighted. For example, highlight a single word and you’ll have the option to use Comment, Describe, open Quick Edit, or select from Related Words. Meanwhile, choose a longer selection of text and you’ll get options such as Comment, Rewrite, Expand, or Visualize as well.

In some cases the Selection Menu is a quicker and easier way to access the toolbar tools—like Rewrite or Describe. But in other cases, the Selection Menu is the primary (or exclusive) way to access a feature. The features that are primarily accessed via the Selection Menu are:

Related Words - This feature is a smart thesaurus. A handful of related words will appear in the Selection Menu when you’ve selected a single word, but you also have the option to expand and view a full Related Words word cloud.

Comment - Annotate your work, leaving a comment on a highlighted passage.

Expand - Take a selection of text and make it longer and more detailed.

Visualize - Visualize can be used to generate an image from a passage of text.

Quick Edit - Quick Edit allows you to make fast, custom inline edits in your document. Quick Edit is available by a keyboard shortcut, but it will also always appear as an option in the Selection Menu—whether you’re selecting a single word or an extended passage.

📓 Selection Menu partial transcript

Welcome back to our Quick Start series. Today, we'll be diving in on Sudowrite’s Selection Menu and Quick Tools.

Did you know there are a few secret features on Sudowrite? They’re not really secret, but they are sort of hidden in plain sight. They live in what we call the Selection Menu. The Selection Menu appears when you’ve highlighted a selection of text.

It’s actually a pretty smart menu—it will only ever be populated with options that are appropriate for the text that you’ve highlighted. Here’s what I mean: Highlight a single word, and you’ll see a few alternatives that you might find in a Thesaurus. Click on 15 More, and you’ll open a panel that we call Related Words, with even more suggestions available. You can select another word—either directly from the Selection Menu or from Related Words here—for a quick inline replacement.

With a single word selected, you also have the option to either Describe or Quick Edit. We’ve already reviewed the Describe function, and I’m sure you can imagine how getting some sensory details might be applicable to a single word. We’ll look at Quick Edit in just a moment—

But first… notice how when you highlight a full paragraph, the Selection Menu changes. Joining Describe and Quick Edit are Rewrite—which we’ve already covered—Expand, and Visualize.

Clicking Visualize will generate an image inspired by your selected prose. Just like all of Sudowrite’s other AI features, the results of Visualize will show up in a card in the History column on the right.

Meanwhile, Expand will take a selection of text and make it longer while adding some new details. As you can see with my selection here, I had a very brief paragraph where someone left the orchard for home, and after Expanding this it has slowed the action into a more methodical and detailed journey.

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