The Five Minute Course
Learn Lex in five minutes.
Lex is a writing workspace built around a clean editor with AI on tap for drafting, feedback, and revision. In five minutes you will practice continuing a draft with +++, asking for targeted feedback, and deciding what to accept.
Plate I The lesson, live
Open full screen ↗I. The idea
+++ or Ask Lex?
Lex gives you two very different kinds of help: text it writes into your document and advice it gives about text you wrote. Mixing them up is how drafts drift away from your voice.
Continue the draft
Type three plus signs and Lex writes the next passage in place, picking up your tone and direction. Reach for it when you know where the piece is going and want momentum, not ideas.
The sidebar chat
A chat panel that can see your whole document. Use it to brainstorm titles, restructure an argument, or ask what a reader might push back on, all without touching the draft itself.
Comments on a selection
Highlight a passage and ask for feedback, and Lex leaves comments the way an editor would. This is the mode for tightening prose you intend to keep in your own words.
II. The practice
What you will do in the lesson
You answer and try things. Nobody demonstrates at you for five minutes.
- Read a draft with fresh eyes. You start with a short, slightly baggy paragraph and decide what kind of help it actually needs: more words, or better ones.
- Trigger +++ deliberately. You see what Lex writes when the preceding text is vague versus specific, and why the setup sentence matters more than the request.
- Ask Lex about structure. You put a question to the sidebar about ordering and compare its suggestion against your own instinct.
- Request feedback on a selection. You highlight one passage, ask for critique, and sort the comments into ones worth acting on and ones to ignore.
- Keep your voice. You practice rejecting a fluent but generic continuation, the habit that separates using Lex from being used by it.
III. Notes
Before you start
Is Lex just Google Docs with a chatbot?
The editor is deliberately minimal, closer to a focused drafting tool than an office suite. The difference is that the AI can see the whole document, continue it in place, and comment on specific passages, rather than living in a separate tab.
Do I need a Lex account or any install for this lesson?
No. The lesson runs in the frame on this page, no signup and no download. If you want to try Lex afterwards, there is a free way to start and it runs in the browser.
Will Lex write the whole piece for me?
It can generate long continuations, but the tool is designed to keep you as the author. The lesson leans into that: you practice using generation for momentum and feedback for quality.
I already use ChatGPT for writing. Why a dedicated editor?
Copying drafts back and forth loses formatting, context, and version history. Lex keeps the model inside the document, so continuations land in place and feedback attaches to the exact passage. If most of your writing ends up as a document rather than a chat, that difference compounds.
IV. Further reading
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