How to compare drafts and revisions quickly and efficiently

If you include writing in your courses, you might be using a draft-revision cycle. I try to teach my students that writing is revision, and every major writing assignment includes at least one draft, which receives feedback from peers and from me. Students can then make use of that feedback to revise their writing. They integrate those revisions into their final submissions, which I then assess and grade.

Of course, revision in writing pedagogy is nothing new. Nancy Sommers wrote a fairly canonical article on it way back in 1982 in which she challenged us to help students see revision not as a burden, but as an opportunity.¹ More recently, Christiansen and Bloch investigate the challenges that students face when trying to revise papers using feedback from their instructors.²

Naturally the whole process surrounding revision and grading revisions takes time. Students need to take time to provide feedback to each other and to take in the feedback they got from their peers and from me. And teachers need to take the time to provide helpful feedback and then to try to assess how well that feedback was implemented.

TLDR: If you just want to try my tool that shows what changed between a draft and a revision, you can find it in the tools section.

This blog post is not about the pedagogical process of leaving that feedback, but rather focuses on the mechanical aspects involved in seeing just what was changed in a revision. It stems from my own personal frustration in trying to compare a student's draft with their revisions, and it offers a free tool I built to help with just that problem.

Did my students actually revise?

First off, let me state that I am not one for policing the behavior of students. I'd much rather spend that energy working on relationships, since that's where I think we can really make a difference for our students at all kinds of learning levels.

That said, if I spend my own precious time giving a student feedback on their work, I want to see how they dealt with that feedback, and in rare cases, whether they dealt with that feedback at all. Of course, in a perfect world, I would open the original draft and put it in a window right next to the revision. I'd comb through both files and evaluate the changes and use that evaluation to shape further feedback and assessment.

But I teach what I would call "medium" numbers of students, most of whom are drafting and revising several major assignments in each class. Our writing classes are capped at 25 or 30 students, depending on the topic. I have colleagues at my own and other institutions who teach much higher numbers of students across multiple sections. Some may be teaching as many as 100 or 125 students each quarter. With those kinds of numbers, combing through each draft and revision by hand is not really an option. Nor is the next best choice: using Word's "compare documents" feature.

Using Word's Track Changes Is a Huge Pain

I will admit: comparing documents in Word is pretty cool. You can open up the draft and revision, and Word will show you the differences in a "Track Changes" format. For one or two files at a time, this works just fine. But for 20 papers it becomes unmanageable. For 100, I'd argue that it's more or less impossible. For years I looked for a tool that I could point at a folder full of drafts and revisions and let me go through each one, easily seeing what had changed.

I never found quite what I was looking for, so I finally used Claude Code to build my own.

A better way to see exactly what your students changed between drafts and revisions

The tool I built takes its inspiration from the docs-as-code philosophy. Docs-as-code treats documents like computer code in that the document is stored in plain text. Plain text means that we can more easily compare changes between two texts, using a tool called "diff."

This tool converts Word docs and PDFs to plain text and then uses jsdiff, an open-source word-level comparison algorithm, to see what changed and gives a couple of options for seeing those changes (in-line, side-by-side, ignore paragraphs where nothing changed, ignore white space changes).

The current version lets you compare individual files or zip files containing multiple drafts and revisions. If you are a Canvas user, you download the submissions for each assignment and then run the tool as a batch on the contents of the zip files. It's programmed to follow the Canvas naming conventions to line up the work for each individual student. In other words, it finds the draft written by Student A and matches it up with the revision written by the same student.

If you are comparing zip files this way, then you can easily navigate among your students' submissions, or just click forward and backward arrows as you grade their work.

What the tool can and can't do

As noted above, the tool lets you easily see word-by-word and paragraph-by-paragraph changes that a student has made while turning their drafts into revised work.

The current version does not show instructor or peer review comments, nor does it show rubric-based feedback for the draft. (But I am actually working on version 2, which would make this possible for people who have API access to Canvas.)

How does it handle private data?

The short answer is, "it doesn't." Even though the tool is provided in your web browser, it doesn't actually upload any files, data, or any other information to my web server or anywhere else. It also doesn't make any calls or send any data to any large language model, so none of your students' writing is being used for training or for any other purpose by any company.

If you are nervous about this (which is totally understandable), you are welcome to check out the source code. You can also turn off your Wi-Fi and Ethernet and use the tool entirely offline.

Try it for free. No account needed.

If I have piqued your interest, then please, give it a shot. You don't need to create an account with Sheetbend to use the tool. If you find it useful, or if you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them (especially if you'd be interested in being able to do bulk diff checking on submissions downloaded from a different LMS). Send me your feedback through the Sheetbend contact form.

Also: Organize your own teaching materials

Finally, if you find this tool helpful, you might want to try out Sheetbend, which tackles another teaching problem: organizing ideas and materials. Sheetbend lets you organize your teaching materials into topics, which you can easily reorganize into new arrangements and output formats.

Sommers, N. (1982). Responding to Student Writing. College Composition & Communication, 33(2), 148–156. https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc198215854 ↩
Christiansen, M. S., & Bloch, J. (2016). “Papers are never finished, just abandoned”: The role of written teacher comments in the revision process. Journal of Response to Writing, 2(1). https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/journalrw/vol2/iss1/2 ↩