A demanding professor grades your draft, or a writing-center tutor gives supportive feedback: your call.
PDF or Word. We read the text out and mark that, in either mode.
A grade is a rubric applied one criterion at a time, and marks can be lost on a criterion the writer never read closely rather than on the quality of the writing itself. Reading your own draft against the marking criteria is the cheapest revision available to you, and it is also the hardest thing to do honestly on work you finished an hour ago. This marks your draft the way a rubric does, so the gap between what the brief asked for and what you wrote is visible while you can still fix it.
With no rubric, any mark is judged against a general standard instead of yours. Paste the criteria your module really uses and the marking follows those lines, which matters most when a brief puts most of its weight somewhere you did not expect.
Grading returns a letter, a score and an itemised list of where the points went. Tutor feedback drops the score entirely and reads like a writing-centre session: what is working, what to improve, and one thing to do next.
Each deduction names the reason it was taken rather than only lowering a number, and the fixes are ordered by how much they would move the mark. A letter on its own is not information; the sentence explaining which paragraph asserts a claim it never evidences is.
This is an estimate made from the text alone, while your marker knows the module, the cohort and what was actually taught in class. It can misread your work, so use the reasoning it gives you and hold the number loosely.
Treat it as an estimate rather than a verdict. Human markers given the same essay and the same rubric do not always agree, which is one reason institutions moderate and second-mark, so no predicted score deserves to be trusted to the decimal. The explanation behind the mark is worth far more than the mark.
Grading gives you a letter and a score with the points itemised, which answers how the draft stands right now. Tutor feedback gives no score at all and concentrates on what to change next, which is more useful early on, when a number would only discourage you.
Yes, whenever you have one. Marking against your own criteria catches the mismatch generic feedback misses, such as a brief that rewards critical evaluation while your draft mostly summarises.
Yes, with a free account. Grading asks you to sign in first, and after that you can paste a draft or upload one you already wrote as a PDF or Word file. A free account also saves your work and comes with higher daily limits.