Documents
Formal vs plain document tone
Register is not a style setting applied at the end. It is decided before a word is written, and it changes the structure, the blocks and the colours as much as the sentences.
Legal
Formal and precise, with defined terms in quotes and no decoration at all: no icons, no charts, nothing that would look odd in front of a court. It is structurally numbered, and it ends with an execution heading and a signature block per signatory rather than a row of underscores. The theme stays sober.
Corporate
Professional and plain. Headings rather than numbered clauses, icons only on key figures, and a restrained theme. This is the default for reports, proposals and internal documents, and it is the register most business writing should be in rather than the semi-legal voice people reach for.
Editorial
Expressive. Banners, imagery, colour and pull quotes are welcome, and a dark theme is allowed where the brand suits it. Case studies, brochures and one-pagers live here. It is the register that goes wrong most often, because it is applied to documents that needed corporate.
Personal
Warm and direct, written in first or second person, with minimal furniture. Letters, welcome packs and anything one human sends another. The mistake to avoid is dressing a personal document as corporate, which is how a welcome letter ends up reading like a policy.
How to get the one you want
Say what the document is and who it is for, and the register follows: an agreement between two companies gets legal, a note to a new client gets personal. If you want to override it, describe the voice in the same sentence, for example a plainly written policy in the second person, and the classification follows the description rather than the document type.
How it works, in three steps
Step 1
Say who it is for
A court, a board, a prospect or a person. That is what sets the register.
Step 2
Override it in words if you need to
Describe the voice you want and the classification follows your description.
Step 3
Do not fight the register afterwards
Adding charts to a legal document, or clauses to a letter, undoes the choice rather than refining it.
The full walkthrough with screenshots is in the guide Create a document with AI.
Limits worth knowing
- Four registers: legal, corporate, editorial and personal.
- Register is chosen at generation, not switched afterwards like a theme.
- It constrains the blocks: a legal document deliberately carries no icons or charts.
See it on a finished piece
Questions people ask
Can I change the register after the document is written?
Not as a switch. Register shapes the structure and the blocks, not only the wording, so changing it means generating again with a different description.
Why does my contract have no charts?
Because a legal register deliberately drops decoration. That is the right look for a document that may be read in a dispute.
Which register should most business documents use?
Corporate. Plain and professional, with headings rather than clauses. The semi-legal voice people reach for is usually a mistake.
Make your own document
The button opens the generator with this use case already described. Change the wording to match yours, generate, then edit anything you like.
Create a document with OneCraftRelated pages
Edit a document with AI
The chat panel is a rewriting tool. It can reach the text of every block on the page, including the ones nested inside a container, and it deliberately cannot touch anything structural.
AI images in a document
Most documents need fewer pictures than people put in them, and the ones that earn their place are specific. Describing the figure you want beats searching for a photograph that nearly fits.
Charts in a document
A chart earns its place when the shape of the data is the point. Six types are available, they take the document theme colours, and the honest advice is that most documents need fewer charts than they contain.
More finished work of this kind is on the document examples hub.