Feedback

After a long stretch of writing, it's hard to see for yourself where the passage loses steam, whether it has drifted from the lore you set up earlier, or whether you keep repeating yourself. Feedback reads the passage on your screen and gives an overall impression with strengths and areas to improve. Along with that come Consistency, which checks the passage against your World and against itself, and Style, which points out your sentence habits.

Say you ask for feedback on page 03, where Vincent leaves the village. It might point out a long run of dialogue that doesn't fit the “quiet” trait noted in Vincent's World node.

Getting feedback

1. Open the page so the passage you want checked is on screen.
2. Press Feedback in the editor toolbar. On a phone, press the Feedback floating at the top of the page.

The agent focuses on what you have on screen and draws on the World nodes related to the writing. The answer streams into a chat card as it's written.

When the reviewed page isn't showing beside the chat — on a phone, with only the chat open, or with another page in the editor — Open appears on the card's bottom row once the answer is done. Press it to open that page at the reviewed passage.

Reading from the impression to areas to improve

The answer comes in this order: Overall impression, Evaluation by aspect, Strengths, and Areas to improve. Below them come the Consistency card and the Style card.

• Evaluation by aspect: One card gives each aspect a star rating out of 5, with a comment on why. The aspects are drawn from the Writing Style assigned to the manuscript and from the passage itself, so they change from work to work.
• Areas to improve: Each point is one paragraph that says what the problem is, why it trips up the reader, and how to fix it. Sentence-by-sentence rewrites are left to Revision.

Checking where the passage departs from your lore

The Consistency card shows everything it checked the passage against: the World nodes it touches, and the passage's own timeline and logic. Issues come first, and below a line, under No issues, each thing you got right follows on its own line. On page 03, the long dialogue that contradicts Vincent's “quiet” trait comes first.

The card header shows how many issues it found and how many things it checked, as in “1 issue · 5 checked”.

Spotting sentence habits in the manuscript

The Style card looks for sentence habits that are hard to notice in your own writing, such as Repeated words, Pet words, and Clichés, and lists the words it found under each. Right after Feedback finishes, those words are highlighted in the manuscript, and a Style indicator at the top of the page shows how many spots are highlighted. The card's two-sentence summary is written in the language of the manuscript it reviewed, so a Japanese manuscript gets its summary in Japanese even on an English screen.

1. Press a word on the card. The manuscript jumps to where that word appears, and the indicator changes to something like “slowly” 1/4.
2. Use ⌃ ⌄ on the indicator to move between the other places the word appears.
3. When you're done, turn the highlights off with the at the end of the indicator.

While the highlights are off, the card shows Show in editor. Press it to turn them back on.

Leaving Revision marks on the sentences

Notes on particular sentences can appear in place in the editor as Revision suggestions. Whether toolbar Feedback places them is up to the Page revision with feedback switch in Settings > Agent, which is on by default.

FAQ

Why can't I press the Feedback button?

The Feedback button stays off until the page has 1,000 characters. Characters are counted including spaces; see the count in Length, which opens when you press the character count below the editor. (Word count and character count)