Essay lets you quickly and easily share your work with friends, classmates, colleagues, or teachers for feedback.
There are several points within the writing process where collaboration is helpful:
During the creative phase, peers can workshop their topics, research questions, initial arguments, and preliminary thesis statements.
Between drafting and revision stages, peers can help identify high-level concerns like essay structure, argument construction, use of sources / support, overall clarity and direction etc.
During the final proofreading stages, peers can help hone in on specific stylistic, grammatical, and formatting concerns.
Essay has seven different comment categories so reviewers can get specific with their critique and provide meaningful feedback, no matter what stage of the writing process you’re at.
Sharing your essay for feedback
To share your essay, click the “share” button at the top right of your Essay workspace
Enter the email of the person you want to share your essay with
You can choose from a list of people you have already shared an essay with
From the drop-down menu, select what kind of access you want to give them, or you can remove their access altogether
You can set the access to your essay so that anyone with your essay link can access it.
You can see who is viewing your essay at the top right, next to the share button.
Accessing your feedback
To access comments, click the “comments tab” found in the toolbar on the right of your workspace, to open up the “comments toolbar.”
How to change comment visibility
You can change the visibility of your comments from within the comments toolbar, by clicking the “visibility icon at the
Default
When set to default visibility, comments will appear in line with your text.
Please note that if you are working on a smaller screen, your comments will not appear inline, but appear as the “minimal visibility” below.
Minimal
When set to minimal visibility, you’ll see a small “comment” icon next to the text where a comment exists.
To open and view the comment, either click on the “comment” icon or click the highlighted text.
Hidden
When set to “hidden” visibility, you will not see any comments in your essay workspace. The only way to access your comments is by opening the comments toolbar.
Filtering Comments
In the comments toolbar, you can filter your comments in several ways.
At the top of the comments toolbar, you have four quick views:
View all comments & highlights
Filter to only view comments
Filter to only see “good work” highlights
Filter to only see “needs work” highlights
You can also get more granular when reviewing your comments. You can click on the filter icon at the top right of the comments toolbar to open up the filter menu. This lets you filter by feedback category, or by person.
Let’s say you know your essay’s structure is messy. You can filter to only see feedback associated with the “organization” category.
Or, let’s say you are writing an essay about Freud, and you know your friend Micheal knows Freud really well. You can filter to just see Michael’s comments.
Resolving comments
If you have fixed the issue associated with a comment, you can resolve it so it no longer appears in your essay. Click the “resolve” icon in the top right corner of the comment card.
You can go back and view resolved comments in the comments toolbar by clicking the filter icon, and filtering to see “resolved” comments.
Learn more about peer review: