Grammar, Rewrite, Tone, Translate: A Field Guide to Browsy's Six Writing Tools

Most AI writing add-ons give you a single text box: type an instruction, get text back. That’s flexible, but it also means re-explaining what you want every time — “make this shorter,” “actually more formal,” “no, keep the meaning but fix the grammar” — through trial and error with a chat interface that has no idea what job you’re actually trying to do.

Browsy takes the opposite approach. Instead of one general-purpose box, it ships six specific tools, each scoped to a single job: Fix Grammar, Rewrite, Adjust Tone, Translate, Expand, and Make Concise. You select text, pick the tool that matches what you’re trying to do, and get a result built for that job specifically — not a chat response you have to steer.

This post walks through what each tool actually does, how you trigger it, and when to reach for it instead of another.

How you trigger any of them

All six tools share the same three entry points, so learning one teaches you all of them:

1. Select editable text (a <textarea>, an <input>, or a contenteditable field like Gmail’s compose box or a CMS editor) and the inline toolbar appears next to your selection. Click the tool you want.
2. Right-click the selection and choose “Fix Grammar with Browsy,” “Rewrite with Browsy,” and so on from the context menu.
3. Open the command palette and search for the tool by name if you’d rather not leave the keyboard.

Every path leads to the same place: the background service worker streams the result back token by token, so you see the rewrite forming rather than waiting on a spinner. That streaming pipeline — and the fact that your text never touches a Browsy server on the way — is the same architecture described in Privacy by Architecture; every tool on this page reuses it rather than rolling its own.

Fix Grammar

Job: fix grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors while preserving your voice.

This is the narrowest tool of the six, and that’s the point. It doesn’t rephrase sentences you wrote correctly, doesn’t swap words for “better” synonyms, and doesn’t touch tone. It’s the tool for the last pass before you hit send — the equivalent of a copyeditor who fixes what’s actually wrong and leaves your sentences alone otherwise.

Reach for this when the content and phrasing are already right and you just want confidence that there’s no typo or dangling comma before it goes out.

Rewrite

Job: rewrite the selected text for clarity, keeping its original meaning.

Rewrite is the tool for sentences that are technically correct but hard to read — buried subjects, tangled clauses, a paragraph that says what you mean but takes too long to say it. Unlike Fix Grammar, it will restructure sentences; unlike Make Concise, it isn’t optimizing for length. The goal is the same meaning, expressed more clearly.

This is the tool most people reach for first, and it’s a reasonable default when you’re not sure which of the six fits — but the other five exist because “make it clearer” isn’t always the actual job.

Adjust Tone

Job: change the tone of the selected text — formal, casual, friendly, and more.

Tone is the one tool in this set that takes a second input beyond the text itself: which tone you want. The same paragraph can come out as a formal client email or a quick message to a teammate, without you having to rewrite the substance twice. This is the tool for the moment you realize a message drafted for one audience needs to go to a different one — the content is fine, the register is wrong.

Translate

Job: translate the selected text to any language.

Translate also takes a second input — the target language — and, like the other five, runs inline wherever you’re typing rather than requiring a separate translation site and a copy-paste round trip. Because it goes through your own Gemini or Grok key rather than a hosted translation API, the same BYOK economics apply: your provider’s rate, not a markup baked into a subscription tier.

Expand

Job: expand the selected text with more detail and context.

Expand is for the opposite problem from Make Concise: a note, bullet, or draft that’s too sparse to stand on its own. Feed it a terse sentence and it fills in supporting detail and context — useful for turning a rough outline point into a real paragraph, or a one-line status update into something a reader who wasn’t in the room can follow.

The distinction worth holding onto: Expand adds detail, it doesn’t add padding. If you want the same idea with more words but no new information, that’s not the job this tool is built for.

Make Concise

Job: shorten the selected text while preserving all key points.

Make Concise is Expand’s mirror image — it removes words, not points. The test of whether it did its job well is whether someone reading only the shortened version would still know everything the longer version told them. This is the tool for the email that’s three paragraphs longer than it needs to be, or the Slack message you drafted as a stream of consciousness and now need to actually send.

Picking the right one

A rough decision path, in the order these problems usually show up while you’re writing:

• Wrong words or punctuation, content and length are fine → Fix Grammar
• Right content, hard to follow → Rewrite
• Right content, wrong register for the audience → Adjust Tone
• Right content, wrong language → Translate
• Too little there → Expand
• Too much there → Make Concise

Because all six are separate, scoped tools rather than one instruction box, you don’t lose accuracy by “explaining what you want” badly — you just pick the tool built for the job in front of you.

The part that doesn’t change no matter which tool you use

Every one of these six runs through the same pipeline described in Privacy by Architecture: your selected text goes from the content script to the background service worker, which reads your stored API key and calls Gemini or Grok directly. No tool on this list is an exception, and none of them requires a different key, a different account, or a different permission grant than the others. Adding five more tools to the one you already use costs nothing extra in privacy exposure or in your provider bill — the marginal cost of a feature you don’t use is exactly zero.

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All six tools are available today from the same inline toolbar, context menu, and command palette — there’s nothing to enable separately. If you’re only using Rewrite, try right-clicking a selection once to see the other five sitting right next to it.