Essay has collaborative features that allow writers to share their work with friends, colleagues, classmates, or teachers, and request feedback.
Accessing someone's work for feedback
When a writer shares their work with you, you’ll be sent an email with a link to open their document in the Essay workspace with guest access (view-only, or comment).
You’ll see which type of access you have at the top, next to the document’s title
You can see who else is viewing the document, and what access they have
If you have comment access, you can open the comments toolbar to view and filter existing comments in the document
Giving feedback on Essay
Essay has three ways you can provide feedback:
Create a comment
Highlight text that needs work
Highlight text to reinforce what the writer has done well
Creating comments
Creating a comment is straightforward: highlight the text you wish to comment on, click the “comment” icon from the “inline toolbar”, and type in your comment.
Creating highlights
If the feedback you're providing is obvious, and no written comment is needed, you can simply highlight the text.
For example, let’s say there is an obvious spelling error, a clear misuse of a comma, a run-on sentence etc. You can quickly bring the author’s attention to it by highlighting it.
You can highlight something that needs work:
Or you can use the “good work” option to highlight something the writer has done well:
Essay’s feedback categories and collaborative philosophy
When creating a comment or highlight, you can choose between 7 different feedback categories. This allows you to get very specific with the kind of feedback you're providing as a reviewer, or requesting as the writer.
Six Traits of Writing
Essay’s feedback and collaborative features are based on The Six Traits of Writing model, which attributes six key ingredients to good writing: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions (spelling & grammar). The goal of The Six Traits of Writing is to provide students and teachers with a common understanding of how to compose, revise, and assess all types of writing.
The Six Traits of Writing model encourages that a piece of writing should be reviewed by six people, each taking on one of the traits and critiquing the work specifically from that lens. For example, one person provides feedback on “ideas,” another person reviews the “organization” of the piece, a third critiques the writer’s “voice,” and so on and so forth.
Of course, it isn’t always possible to have your essay reviewed by six people. However, it is still very valuable to have feedback that is broken down into the six traits of good writing to help understand which aspects of your writing need to improve.
From the perspective of the reviewer, framing your peer review in this way helps you provide descriptive and specific feedback that will be much more meaningful to the writer.
Essay’s seven feedback categories
While the comments feature is based on The Six Traits of Writing model, we’ve added a seventh category. Here is a quick overview of the seven categories:
General: high-level feedback about the essay as a whole.
Ideas: does the writer present a single topic and convey a clear message?
Organization: does the writer reveal ideas in a logical order? This would include a beginning, middle and end; cause-effect; or what-why structure.
Voice: does the author write in a way that:
engages the reader with the subject
is appropriate for the subject matter and audience
feels personal and expressive?
Word choice: does the writer use the right word in the right place to convey the right meaning?
Sentence Fluency: are the writer’s sentences complete sentences, with a variety of sentence length, complexity, and structure?
Spelling and grammar: does the writer follow the rules of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar?
Learn more about peer review: