Is Google Docs version history proof you wrote it?

Open the document and click Last edit at the top right. A panel lists the versions by date and time, with who made each one, and opening a version shows the document as it was then (Google’s help).

Name the versions that matter, such as the outline, the first full draft and the one you handed in. Google merges unnamed versions as a document ages, and naming one keeps it from being merged. A document can have up to 40 named versions.

Only somebody who can edit a document can see its history, so there are three ways to show it:

• –Share the document with them as an editor, if you are comfortable with that.
• –Show it to them in person, or on a shared screen, stepping through the versions.
• –Send screenshots of the history panel and of the key versions, with their dates in view.

Share the original. A copy of a Google Doc starts with no history of its own, and a document exported as a Word file or a PDF loses it too.

A teacher who wants more than the list of versions can use Draftback, a Chrome extension that replays a document’s revision history like a film. It works on any Google Doc its user can edit, including ones written before it was installed (draftback.com).

• –It thins out. Unnamed versions are merged over time, so an old document shows fewer, bigger steps than it was written in.
• –Its owner can delete it. Google lets a document’s owner remove its version history for good, so a reader has to trust that what is left is all there was.
• –It shows that text arrived, not where it came from. A large block that appears all at once may be pasted from your own notes, or from anywhere else, and text retyped from another source looks like typing.
• –It lives inside the document. A reader of the published piece cannot see it, and showing it to anybody means giving them access or taking screenshots.

Two tools exist to make the record itself the thing you hand over:

• –Grammarly Authorship works inside Google Docs, Word and Grammarly’s own editor, and records whether text was typed, pasted or AI-assisted. It gives you a report, colour-coded sentence by sentence, that you decide when to share. It needs a Grammarly account and the extension or app.
• –iwrote is a place to write in the browser that records how the words arrive, then certifies the piece with a short link to put under it or hand in with it. Whoever opens the link sees how it was written, and can check the record in their own browser, without asking iwrote.

Either one covers only writing done in it, from the moment it started. For an essay already written in Google Docs, the history above is what you have, and if you have been accused, it is the first thing to bring. For the next one, see handing in an essay with a certificate.