Take a tour of your Essay Home.
Key features include:
Create and edit your essays and notes
Organize your essays and writing projects into Folders
Assign a status to your writing projects
Track the progress of each project as you go
Throw your discarded writing in the Trash bin
Quick Look:
Left navigation
The left navigation is where your folders will live along with the quick filtered pages like Recent and Starred essays.
Notes
From the Essay Home, you can access the Notes page. The Notes page is where you'll find all of your notes, displayed on Notes cards. From the Notes page, you can create new notes, edit existing notes, tag notes, and link them to your essays.
For more information on how to use Notes, please read our Notes article.
Folders
Essay Home has folders! Folders are here to help you keep your home neat, tidy and organized.
How to create folders
You can create folders for each class you're taking, for each chapter of the book you're writing, or for keeping your journal entries in one place.
You will find the Folders section in the left navigation.
To create a folder, click on the "+" icon at the top of the "Folders" section
Follow the prompts to create your new folder:
Give the folder a name
Your “unfiled” essays (essays that don’t belong to a folder) will appear in a list — you can select any unfiled essays to place in your new folder
Click Create folder
Expanding the folder view
In the "Folders" section in the left navigation, you can click the arrow next to a folder's title to expand it and see the essays contained within that folder. Clicking on the title of an essay will open it.
Sorting your folders
Within the left navigation, you can sort your folder view. Click on the “sort folders” icon at the top of the folder menu to sort based on “alphabetical” order or “last modified”.
Quickly jump to a folder
You can also navigate to a folder by clicking on the folder tag in the table view from other places such as the Your Work, Starred, Search results, and Recent.
Clicking on the folder tag will take you directly to that folder.
Renaming a folder
You can rename a folder by hovering over the folder and clicking on the three dots. When you select “Rename”, the folder title becomes editable.
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You can also rename a folder from within that folder by hovering over the title and clicking the rename icon.
Moving an essay to a folder
You can move an essay to a folder in two ways.
When you select an essay (or multiple essays) you’ll be given options to either “Move to folder” or “Move to trash”.
Click on the three dots along the right side of the row of an essay and select "Move to folder".
When you are moving an essay to a folder, you will have the option to “Create a new folder” or move it to an existing folder.
Deleting a folder
You can delete a folder from the menu that appears when you hover your mouse over that folder in the left navigation.
When you choose to delete a folder you will be presented with a warning and two options:
Delete folder:
only deletes the folder. The essays contained in the folder are moved to "Your work" and they become "unfiled".
Delete folder and essay(s):
deletes the folder and all essays contained within it. If you select this option, the essays will be moved to the Trash and you will have 30 days to restore any deleted essays.
Trash
You can find the trash bin at the bottom of the left navigation.
If you delete an essay it can be found in the "Trash". You will have 30 days to restore a deleted essay before it is permanently deleted.
You can restore or permanently delete an essay in the Trash folder in two ways:
Select the essay by clicking the checkbox to the left of the title of the essay. Click: "Restore" if you want to restore the essay; or "Permanently delete" if you want to delete the essay.
Click on the three dots along the right side of the row of an essay to either "Restore" or "Permanently delete".
Renaming & Starring an essay
If you hover your mouse over the title of an essay, you will see two icons appear:
Clicking on the star icon will star your essay.
This is for marking your essay as a priority. You can see all of your starred essays by clicking on "Starred" in the left navigation.
Clicking the "rename" icon will open a text field to edit the title of your essay.
Status
Status is one of the ways Essay Home helps you stay on top of your work. You can now assign a status to an essay to help you visualize where you are in the process of writing it.
There are three statuses:
"Not started"
Upon creation of an essay it will be marked as "Not started". You can manually change the status via the context menu or by clicking the status badge.
The "Not started" status helps you plan ahead. For instance, if you know you have a midterm coming up, you can create the essay and mark it as "Not started" to keep it on your radar.
"In progress"
The "In progress" status marks all the essays and writing projects you’re currently working on. Keep track of all the projects you have on the go at once and allocate your time appropriately.
"Complete"
Mark your essay as "Complete" when you are finished.
You can filter the list of essays to view all your essays marked with the same status. Just click on the funnel icon next to "Status" and select the status you want to filter.
This is a great way to visualize where all your work stands. We hope this will help you manage your time so no writing project is left behind.
Changing an essay's status
As mentioned in the previous section, when you create an essay it will get assigned the "Not started" status. You can change an essay's status in a couple ways:
Clicking directly on the essay’s status will bring up a menu with the status options. You can then assign your essay the appropriate status.
The second way to change an essay’s status is to use the context menu. Hover your mouse over the essay you want to choose and click on the three dots ("...") on the right side of the row. Then select the "Change status" option.
After clicking the "Change status" option you will then see a menu where you can
assign the status.
Progress
Another important progress tracking feature of Essay Home is called, well, Progress! Progress builds off of the status column to help you understand exactly where your work stands. You can not only see the status of each individual essay, but you can see exactly how far away you are from completing it!
You can set each essay or writing project's Progress individually. To do so, open up an essay and go to that essay's "Workspace Settings". To enable the "Progress" display, you will first need to set a "Word count goal" for the essay and then select one of four "Visibility" settings.
The progress display will then track the progress of your essay relative to that word count.
There are 4 different progress display options you can choose from:
Hidden:
no progress display will be shown
Progress and word count:
the progress column will display both the progress bar with a completion percentage, as well as the word count of the essay.
Progress only:
the progress column will only display the progress bar with a completion percentage.
Word count only:
the progress column will only display the word count of the essay.
Search
You will find the search bar at the top of your screen.
You can search by essay keyword, search within a specific folder, or search within your unfiled essays. When you click on the search bar, you will be able to type into the search bar. You will also see a list of all your folders and an icon for “unfiled”. Clicking on any of those folders will enable you to search for an essay directly in that folder.
You can also search for any unfiled essays — essays that you have not assigned to a folder. Click on the “unfiled” icon to search for unfiled essays only.
We hope the features of Essay Home will bring some order and organization to your writing so you can spend less time worrying about where things stand, and more time writing!
Have more questions? Feel free to reach out to us via the chat on our website! Let us know if there’s an element of Essay Home that we did not explain.
We encourage you to check out our roadmap to get a glimpse of what's in store for Essay, as well as have an active say in which features you'd like to see developed.
Good luck with your writing!