--- title: "Writing Plans, Focus Documents and Citations" slug: "writing-plans-focus-documents-and-citations" updated: 2026-11-01T18:23:53Z published: 2026-11-01T18:23:53Z canonical: "support.govdash.com/writing-plans-focus-documents-and-citations" --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://support.govdash.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Writing Plans, Focus Documents and Citations ## Overview Every section in your outline has three ways to guide what GovDash writes: a **Writing Plan**, **Focus Documents** and citations to the solicitation. Open a section by clicking its name in the **Outline** tab to find them in the section editor. After you generate, use **View sources** to see where the content came from, and regenerate any section you want to improve. --- ## Writing Plans The Writing Plan section is where you can provide GovDash with specific instructions on how you’d like the section written, key points you’d like included, strengths for GovDash to write to, and more. You can think of GovDash as your proposal manager, and the Writing Plan as your to-do list for the way you want the section written. These are best handled in bullet points, but you can provide instructions in narrative form as well. By providing GovDash with context and direction, your proposal content will be better informed by what makes your team best suited for the solicitation. > [!NOTE] > Pricer Only Sections > > For Pricer Only sections, Writing Plans steer strategy and emphasis but can't change figures, since all numbers come from your Pricer workbooks. --- ## Focus Documents Focus Documents are supplementary materials like partner capabilities, technical specs, customer needs, notes, etc. that help tell the story of why your team is the best fit for the job. Unlike solicitation documents (which are static and customer-defined), Focus Documents are where you highlight your strengths, provide context, and give insights that can help tailor your response to stand out. After clicking on a section within your outline and scrolling to the bottom of the section editor, you can select or upload Focus Documents that apply to the section they’re uploaded to. These documents **will not** be utilized as context for other sections, with one exception: when you generate with **Agentic generation**, Focus Documents uploaded to a section also apply to every subsection beneath it, and they can be cited as sources in that section and its subsections. This lets you upload a document once to a volume and have it used throughout its subsections. ![](https://cdn.us.document360.io/104c3542-bffe-46a6-901f-aa7a848851a4/Images/Documentation/image(135).png) You can also utilize the **Existing Focus Documents** tab when uploading Focus Documents to quickly pull from your proposal’s Focus Document pool of documents. ![](https://cdn.us.document360.io/104c3542-bffe-46a6-901f-aa7a848851a4/Images/Documentation/image-HFXM3EWW.png) ### Solution Attachments You can provide GovDash with additional context within our **Solution** tab under the **Capture Plan** on the left of your proposal view, which is where you can detail your approach, solution, customer needs, risks, and more. [Click here to learn more](/v1/docs/adding-solution-information) about the Solution tab and how to upload additional documents to these questions. ![](https://cdn.us.document360.io/104c3542-bffe-46a6-901f-aa7a848851a4/Images/Documentation/image(686).png) --- ## Instruction, Task Area and Evaluation Criteria Citations When GovDash analyzes your solicitation package, shreds your documents, and creates your outline, it also maps instructions and evaluation criteria from the main instructional document (like the RFP, RFI, etc.) and task areas from the PWS to relevant sections automatically to ensure that your proposal content will be compliant. You can change these citations at any time by clicking the **Modify Citations** button found within the section editor of any section of the outline. GovDash can automatically search for relevant instructions, evaluation criteria, and task areas by using the **Auto-Cite** button. This is especially helpful when creating new sections, as GovDash can do the work for you, saving you time. ![](https://cdn.us.document360.io/104c3542-bffe-46a6-901f-aa7a848851a4/Images/Documentation/image(595).png) ### Citations Editor After clicking on **Modify Citations**, you’ll be brought to the citations selection screen, you can add (**1**), edit, or remove (**2**) any cited instructions or task areas that GovDash had selected. By hovering over a citation (**3**), you can also view where it was pulled from directly from the document on the right. Citations are also broken out and grouped by the document they were extracted from. From the document drop down (**4**), you can freely select any document from your solicitation package. You can also easily switch between sections/subsections using the outline section list (**5**) on the far left. ![](https://cdn.us.document360.io/104c3542-bffe-46a6-901f-aa7a848851a4/Images/Documentation/image(621).png) ### Adding Citations To add citations, click the arrow icon in the top left of the document viewer, and choose one of the **Highlighters** to add citations from that category by clicking within any of the solicitation package documents. ![](https://cdn.us.document360.io/104c3542-bffe-46a6-901f-aa7a848851a4/Images/Documentation/2025-07-21_19-18-59.gif) ### Removing Citations Removing citations can be done either from the list of citations on the left, using either the heading level or sentence level controls, or by using the **Eraser** from the Highlighters menu shown above. With the Eraser, you can click within the document to remove citations. ![](https://cdn.us.document360.io/104c3542-bffe-46a6-901f-aa7a848851a4/Images/Documentation/image(599).png) > [!NOTE] > Does this affect my compliance matrix? > > Yes! Any changes made to the citations within the citations editor (whether adding or removing) will adjust your compliance matrix. To learn more about the compliance matrix in GovDash, [check out our support article here](/v1/docs/compliance-matrix-and-review-mode). --- ## Sources Within each section, after generating your proposal, you can view how your contracts, Data Library, and Focus Documents were used when generating the content of the section by clicking the **View sources** button in the top right of the section editor. ![](https://cdn.us.document360.io/104c3542-bffe-46a6-901f-aa7a848851a4/Images/Documentation/image(359).png) Within the **Citations** tab, you can view how GovDash generated specific content that shows within the section content viewer, mapped to a specific number. By clicking the drop down **View how source content is being used**, you can see the logical reasoning GovDash used when generating said content. Within the **Sources** tab, GovDash will display all of the documents that were used to generate the content within the section, giving you key insight into how your data is used. You can click on any document to go directly to that document within GovDash. ![](https://cdn.us.document360.io/104c3542-bffe-46a6-901f-aa7a848851a4/Images/Documentation/image(360).png) > [!NOTE] > Pricer Only Sections > > Pricing figures in Pricer Only sections don't receive inline citations, since each one comes directly from your Pricer workbooks. --- ## Regenerating Sections Once you’ve generated your proposal for the first time, you can freely regenerate individual sections. The main benefit here is that you can iterate on individual sections, upload additional Focus Documents, adjust the Writing Plan, and then see those improvements all within the section editor, all while keeping the sections you don’t want to change the same. ![](https://cdn.us.document360.io/104c3542-bffe-46a6-901f-aa7a848851a4/Images/Documentation/image(296).png) You can also regenerate multiple sections at once using the checkboxes within the outline. Once you’ve made your selection, click the ![](https://cdn.us.document360.io/104c3542-bffe-46a6-901f-aa7a848851a4/Images/Documentation/image(298).png) button in the black box that appears towards the bottom of the page. ![](https://cdn.us.document360.io/104c3542-bffe-46a6-901f-aa7a848851a4/Images/Documentation/image(297).png)