Collecting Material While You Read

Drafts generates from the articles you attach to it. This page is about where those articles come from, which is the part that decides whether the output is any good.

The short version: attach while reading, not while writing. Everything below is why that is not merely tidier.

Add to draft, from any article

Every open article has an Add to draft button. It puts that article on a draft without leaving what you are reading — no copying, no separate tab, no note to yourself.

So a piece you are working on collects its sources over days, in the order you met them, while you are still in the frame of mind that made each one seem relevant.

The alternative is reconstructing a reading list afterwards, which loses in two ways. You forget things — reliably, and disproportionately the ones you read early. And what you do remember is filtered by the argument you have since decided to make, which is exactly the wrong filter: the piece that complicated your thesis is the one you most need in the materials and the one least likely to come back to mind.

Saved is not the same as attached

Saved is your own shelf and a strong ranking signal. Materials are the inputs to one specific draft.

They overlap and are not interchangeable. Save something because you want it and because you want more like it; attach it because this piece needs it. A saved article you never write about did its job; a material you attach and never cite did not.

In practice most people save first and attach later, from the materials pane's own list of your articles. That works. What does not work is treating Saved as a filing system — it has no folders, it is one list, and past a few hundred items it stops being findable.

How many, and which order

Up to 20 materials per draft. The first 8 reach the generator, at roughly 2,500 characters each.

That gap is the thing to know, and it is not a bug to work around — it is what keeps a draft written from sources you chose rather than assembled from everything you touched. But it makes order meaningful:

Put the ones you want cited at the top. Materials past the eighth are still attached, still listed, still useful as a reading list travelling with the piece — they are simply not what the draft is written from.

So a draft with 20 attached and 8 that matter is a perfectly good state, as long as the 8 are the first 8.

Two sources, minimum, and why

Attach exactly one article and Feedpik warns you before generating.

The instruction that keeps the generator honest — write from the materials and nothing else — makes a single-material draft a paraphrase engine. Facts are free for anyone to reuse. The framing, the selection of what mattered, and the order it is told in are the other writer's work, and a one-material draft inherits all three whether you intended it or not.

Two sources on the same story do not just add facts. They disagree about emphasis, and that disagreement is where your own piece starts.

Where good materials come from

The rest of Feedpik is upstream of this, and the creator workflow is the full version. In short:

• Trending Radar — several of your sources converging is a story with more than one account of it, which is exactly the material a draft wants
• Tracking — a term watch collects mentions of your subject over weeks, across sources that do not usually cover it
• Saved — the deliberate shelf

If something looks wrong

A material shows as missing — the article left your account. Missing materials are skipped by the generator and left out of the copied source list.

Citations point at the wrong article — [n] follows a material's position, so reordering or removing one after generating leaves stale numbers behind. Regenerate after changing materials.

I attached 20 and it used a handful — by design; 8 reach the generator. Reorder so the ones you want cited come first.

Add to draft is missing — it is a Max feature. See plans.