Checking an essay before you submit
You have finished the draft, the deadline is somewhere unhelpfully close, and you would like to know whether any of it reads like it came out of a machine. 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 also the edit that changes the most for the least work. Click it, read what was noticed about it, and write that passage 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 ones that came back as yours. 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 you should be matching when you go back to rewrite anything grey.
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
After you have made the edits, run the whole thing again. This confirms the rewrites did what you wanted, and it catches anything new that crept in while you were editing, which does happen.
If you are planning to acknowledge in your assessment statement that you used a checking tool, a second clean run is a reasonable thing to be able to point at.
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 no long unbroken runs of grey, a conclusion you actually wrote, 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.