Most designers and users of Canva primarily use the tool for the purpose of creating artistic designs, such as images for print-on-demand, promotional material, social media ads, magazines, newsletters, and more.
But Canva allows us to do even more than this, and its functionality is heavily strengthened with the help of tools built on artificial intelligence. One such tool is the magic write tool. This is Canvas’s own copywriting toolset.
To use the magic write tool, go to the web page https://www.canva.com/magic-write/ and then select the button Try Magic Write. This will take you to a design page similar to the canvas page for designing, except the tools here focus on creating new copy for your projects or work.
There are many tools that allow us to create high-quality copy for our websites, digital products, and more. Canvas magic write is just one of these tools, but it stands out because of its ai functionality and compatibility for use with over canva tools, allowing you to not just write copy but design entire pages with Canva.
How To Use Magic Write To Create Copy
The primary purpose of the Magic Write toolset is to create copy that can potentially be used for things like the home page of websites, newsletter articles, digital product landing pages, presentations, etc.
If you go to the canvas home page, you can select the Create a Design button that is located in the top corner.
The template from the appearing menu that you select will create a canvas and set up tools suitable for the purpose of the template.
The very first option here is the Doc template, which allows us to write documents. Left click to open a new tab on your browser where you can access the features for writing new documents and sales copy.
Using The Ai Features Of The Magic Write Tool
The real power of creating documents in Canva is in its ai functionality. While most of the settings are relatively standard writing tools and formatting options, the Magic Write tool itself is a powerful writing content generator.
When working with the document, click on the plus button that allows you to add elements to the document, such as the headings. At the very top of the list, we have the ability to use the magic write tool.
If we left-click on this option, we will bring up a text prompt. In this prompt, we can write a phrase or sentence that describes what we want Canva to write for us.
The only rule here is that we require a minimum of 5 words for our prompt. For example, we will use the prompt ‘A story about a fox in the forest‘ and then press enter to confirm. Canva will then attempt to write based on the prompt.
In this example, we can see that the Magic Write tool does an excellent job regarding the content itself, even though we don’t have much to describe the story other than the setting and the main character.
The technology is still new, so we will notice a few drawbacks. For example, the grammar may not always be perfect, and little could be done concerning the formatting. In our test, we ended up with one large blob of text instead of being divided up into paragraphs.
However, these initial drawbacks do not result from the ai being unable to format our stories, as we have not told Canva how we want the story to be written.
For a second test, we use the plus button again to return to the magic write tool. We want Canva to write a similar story this time, but we add more detail.
The prompt we use for our example is ‘A story about a fox in the forest divided up into short paragraphs. The fox meets a badger who offers him shelter and some company from the storm. Give a random name to the fox and the badger. The story ends with the storm ending and the fox leaving to find its mate.’
As you can see, there is a lot more detail here, and when we press the enter key to initiate the tool, we get this result.
Note that Canva currently generates the prompt as the headline, while the ai generated text is in a smaller font.
The text is now formatted in smaller paragraphs, which means that Canva can format it if we tell it how to format it.
Not only that but if we give specific instructions within our text prompt, Canva can follow those as well. If we take a look at the third line in the text prompt, we can see that we tell can vote to give a random name to the two characters of the story, the Fox and the badger the name Benny.
How To Expand Text Created With The Magic Write Tool?
By default any text produced by our AI prompts is not going to be that long. The story that was initially written here by our second prompt isn’t that much longer than the prompt itself. So how can we expand upon what has already been written?
We can do this by selecting all of the text that was produced using the magic write tool. Next, click on the plus button, which brings us to the same menu. However, this time we have additional options that are unique to the magic write tool.
The second of these options allows us to expand the text we have already generated using AI. Left click, and after a couple of seconds, we can expand on the initial story.
We can even repeat this several times until we create the length we want for the story or the form of text we want to generate. The best thing about this is that it still maintains the core features of the story listed in the initial text prompt.
Rewriting Our Text With Magic Write
If we are not happy with the text that was generated by Canva Ai, we can always ask it to write the text again.
Select the text that you want to be rewritten and then return to the tools menu. This time select the rewrite option.
The story has been rewritten but not replaced. In the image above the text highlighted green is the story rewritten. You have the choice then of if you want to use the new version of your story or the old one.
Be mindful that formatting for rewritten stories may not match that of the original, especially if you deleted the original text prompt.
How To Summarize Longer Text With Magic Write?
Not only does the Magic Right tool have the ability to expand upon an existing piece of text, it can also summarise longer text.
The one limitation here is that your text cannot exceed 1500 words. But if the text you wanted summarises shorter than 1500 words, then you can use the Summarised text option located in the same menu as the other AI based tools to create a much smaller summary of your text.
The above image is an abstract of text from one of the other articles on this website. As you can see, there are eight small paragraphs of content that we want to summarise. To do this, highlights all of the text, not including the heading.
Then click on the plus button to open up the menu again and choose the Summarised text option.
A slightly longer paragraph is added at the bottom of this text abstract which becomes a summary of all of the contents written above it.
Can I Use Magic Write With A Free Canva Account
The magic write tool can be valuable for creating documents and sales copy. But if you use Canva a lot, you’ll have probably noticed that there are a few other Magic tools, and these also use artificial intelligence to boost their functionality.
Of course, not all of Magic Write is ai based on, and you can design and write your documents without using ai. However, the magic write tool itself, which is located when you click on the plus button, is an ai based tool.
You will notice next to the tool that there is an icon with a small crown next to it. In Canva this icon is used to signify pro features, which are only accessible when you have a subscription to the Canva Pro account.
So while you can create full documents or sales copy for free using Canva, the magic write ai tool is an additional paid feature that comes with Canva Pro.