Emboss

Emboss is a proof-of-work layer for your writing; a visible record of the care, time, sessions, cadence, pauses, edits, and revisions that tell the story behind a piece of human-written work.

Emboss is not an AI detector. We know “AI-powered” detectors are faulty and unethical in practice. Emboss lets you share your metrics with your audience to show the human processes and labor behind the work, capturing how a document was written—the sessions, the edits, the time you put in, as positive evidence of human authorship.

Emboss is also private by default, and only visible if you choose to share your metrics with your work.

No AI is used in the compiling of these metrics.

How it works

• From the Share and Export panel on the right sidebar, click on Reader link.

• From there, open the Emboss your work section.

• Toggle on writing journey to share it in your Reader link.

• Readers will see an Emboss badge at the top bar of the Reader, and an expandable Writing journey metrics card beside your work’s title.

• Clicking it opens a panel with your writing metrics.

Viewing your writing journey

You can also view these metrics yourself from your document's info panel while you're writing, so you can follow your own progress.

Your writing journey metrics

Your writing journey draws on your document's edit and version history to show stats like:

• Word count: The full word count of a document or draft.

• Active writing time: The time spent writing on a document or draft.

• Sessions: The number of separate writing sessions (a new session begins after a gap of more than 30 minutes).

• Average writing speed: Measures words written per active minute (excluding pasted test). (Typical human range: 30-70 wpm).

• Thinking pauses: Measures pauses longer than 5 seconds during active writing sessions.

• Total edits: How many saved changes were recorded after the first version of a document or draft.

• Words-to-edit ratio: The number of words divided by the number of edits in a document or draft (lower numbers mean more revisions).

• Paste ratio: The percentage of all characters ever added to the document/draft that were inserted by pasting.

Things to know

• Imported work and older documents written/including writing from before Emboss debuted may not display every metric. Emboss draws on existing edit and version history, but several writing journey metrics only started recording when the feature was introduced.

• Writing journey metrics currently describe the draft as a whole rather than work split between collaborators.

Public version history

For an added proof-of-work layer, you can also share selected version history snapshots alongside your work in the Reader, giving editors, teachers, publishers, or readers an
in-depth record of the work’s development.

You can toggle on Version history from the Emboss section of the Reader link panel.

This will display snapshots of your document or draft’s version history in the right side of the Reader view.

From there, you can choose to show versions from 30 minutes, hours, days, all the way up to months prior to publishing.

If you revert back to the free plan

Your Emboss badges and writing journey metrics will stay saved to your documents and account, but they won’t be visible or accessible while you’re on the free plan.

If you’ve Embossed work on Reader links, the Emboss badge and writing journey will no longer appear on those links until your Plus access is restored.

If you re-subscribe or upgrade to the one-time payment, your Emboss badges and writing journey will reappear on your documents and Reader links.