Checking an essay before you submit
You have finished the draft, the deadline is somewhere unhelpfully close, and you would like to check it for AI patterns before anybody else does: which parts sound like you, and which sound like they came out of a machine whether or not they did. This takes about ten minutes on a normal-length essay.
Before you start
Have the finished draft to hand as text, copied out of Word or Google Docs or wherever it lives, and a free account, which takes a Google sign-in and no card.
One thing worth knowing: run this on a complete draft rather than a half-written one. Part of what the engine looks at is whether the style holds steady across the whole document, and a partial draft gives it a distorted picture of what steady looks like for you.
The other thing is length. Two reviewers argue your text out passage by passage, and below roughly 250 words there is not enough on the page for them to disagree about, so a very short piece gets turned away rather than guessed at.
Step one — paste it in and press Analyse
There is nothing to set up first and no mode to choose. Paste, press Analyse, and wait.
While it runs you get a loading screen assembled from your own sentences, which is decoration and nothing else. The progress bar in the middle is the part that means anything.
Step two — start with the long grey stretches
When the marks land, resist reading every one of them in order, because that is how ten minutes becomes an hour.
Go to the longest unbroken run of grey first. A paragraph marked end to end is a stronger signal than five separate sentences scattered through the essay, and it is the place where an edit changes the most for the least work. Click it and read what was noticed about it. Then decide. If the passage is formal because the subject needs it to be, that is not a fault and you can leave it. If it reads like nobody in particular wrote it, write it again in your own words.
Then do the next longest. Two or three of those will usually account for most of what is on the page.
Step three — read the end of your essay
Conclusions are the most predictable thing machine writing does. Models are remarkably consistent about acknowledging a limitation and then pivoting to what further work might look like, and if you have ever felt a conclusion writing itself, that shape is why.
If your final paragraph has come back grey, do not tidy it. Put it aside and write down, in a sentence, what you actually think your argument showed and what you would genuinely argue for next. That sentence is nearly always better than what was there.
Step four — read your gold passages
Gold marks are the passages that read most like one particular person. They carry the small irregularities that people produce and models smooth away, and they are the most useful thing on the page.
Read three or four of them together and notice what they have in common — the length you naturally write to, the way you get into a sentence, whether you use examples or arguments to make a point land. That is your register, and it is what to listen for when you go back to anything grey you have decided to rewrite.
Step five — rewrite in place
Click any marked passage and you can edit it where it sits, with the rest of the document still around it, which matters because a sentence that reads well on its own can still land badly between the two either side of it.
Write it yourself rather than accepting anything wholesale. The aim is not to get the mark to go away; the aim is to say the thing in the way you would say it, and the mark going away is a side effect of that.
Step six — run it once more, if you changed a lot
After a heavy edit, a second run shows you how the new passages read next to the old ones, and it catches anything that crept in while you were editing, which does happen. It is a second look at the writing and not a certificate. Nobody needs a page with no grey on it, and a run that comes back cleaner proves nothing to anybody.
If your institution asks you to say which tools you used, say you used this one to review your own draft.
What a finished check looks like
Not a document with no marks on it. Real essays carry some, and an essay with none at all is often one that has been polished until nobody is left in it.
What you are looking for is that you have read every long grey run and chosen what to do about it, a conclusion that says what you think, and gold spread through the piece rather than clustered in one early paragraph where you were still warmed up.
If it looks like that, you are done. Go and submit it.
What this costs
The first 1,000 words are free when you sign up, and no card is asked for. Most undergraduate essays are longer than that, so the free allowance shows you what gets marked on an opening section rather than clearing a whole piece.
Past that, individual accounts run on a fixed monthly plan from £8.40 a month, tax included, with a monthly allowance of checking credit. If you go over the allowance the excess is metered and settled at month end up to a fair-usage cap, which exists so that you are never stopped halfway through an essay at midnight.
One thing we will not do
We will not rewrite your work for you. There is no button here that takes your draft and hands you back a cleaner one, and there is not going to be, because the thing that makes writing yours is that you did it.
Agency is yours to keep. Autonomy is ours to offer.