Step 1 is communication.

Talk to your english teacher. Explain to them, why Google Docs, the way they track history and changes, is not a preferred option for you, due to ethical or privacy considerations.

Explain to them your selected technical alternatives for tracking changes. A few alternatives are (many commenters already covered):

• LibreOffice Word + it’s build in version history
• Etherpad, onlyoffice, or an open source hosted solution with version history
• Git: Yes, it is the most technical option. But don’t assume that your teacher doesn’t know it, or is unwilling to learn it, so it has to be included on the list for a complete set of options.

Secondly, you need to remember that what your english teacher wants is not “document history”, but instead seeing your process (maybe to prove you didn’t chatgpt it, in which case, writing it on paper also might prove that). If none of those technical alternatives are viable solutions for them, another alternative is to simply submit documents that encapsulate each stage of the process. For example, a common pattern that my teachers and professors would do for writing assignments is:

• Annotated Bibliography: Collection of sources, but also annotations, or comments on each one. Why you included them, how they can be used in your essay, and so on.
• Outline: This can be bullet point like overviews of each paragraph and the topics they will discuss, how, and what sources will be used
• Rough draft (and various stages of it, as it gets reviewed by you, or others like classmates)
• Final Draft: self explanatory

The above setup is nice, because it is not tied to any particular software, and can even be executed on paper. This would mean that future students, similar to you, going through the same class, could write essays with their preferred writing software, instead of only with google docs or whatever solution you get the teacher to learn how to work with (assuming they are nontechnical and teaching the teacher is difficult.

I only started seeing it done like this in college classes. High school classes only sometimes required an outline, and never required an annotated bibliography. It also is more work then just writing an essay from sources.

But the two big benefits of this setup are:

• Even though it is more work initially, it is less work overall, while leading to a better organized and higher quality essay.
• By assigning due dates to each step of the process, the teacher can eliminate lots of procrastination and doing the entire essay at the last minute.

Good Luck!

Do you have access to an Etherpad-server? (Or better yet, can set one up by yourself?)

It allows petty minute tracking of changes and makes it easy to see how the document evolved over time. It has just enough Rich-Text-capabilities to be suitable for an assignment in English class, without too much distraction. And you can simply share a link to your pad with the teacher. As it also tracks authorship, they can even add redactions and commentary.

The way you normally do this for Word documents is Track Changes. Microsoft Word and Libre Office also have a built-in way to compare two documents, in case you didn’t have Track Changes enabled. I assume if they’re asking for document history, they want to see what changed when revising your draft, not in what order you pressed the keys. Although personally I tend to revise back the past part of the document as I’m writing instead of writing multiple drafts and this wouldn’t really work for me. I guess another option is just to use set a timer and save a new version every so often. Maybe there’s a trick you can do with scripting to make copies of your autosave file and then combine those into a format your teacher can understand.

Using Git is out of touch. It’s incredibly unlikely that a language teacher understands Git or cares to learn how to use Git.

It sounds like your teacher probably has a way they expect students to do this, probably Google Docs or Office 365. Both of these have web versions so you could use them even if you’re running Linux.

Besides track changes in word (already mentioned), I save versions of my work docs by appending the date and time to the file name. This makes it easy to confirm of we’re all looking at the same doc.

Example: worddoc_2026-09-08_16-46

Time uses 24 hour clock, so I never guess AM/PM, and it makes sorting really easy.

Nice thing is this works for any document type.

Just save a new copy after each session. Sure, there are more elegant ways to track changes and version history, but if he literally wants progress reports, zip everything up when you send him the final.

This might sound stupid but git?

I just write text docs in Emacs and use Git for version tracking. If he wants real-time tracking it’s possible that one of the collaboration editors can do that and I might look into it. In the extreme you could videotape yourself working and typing, and maybe saying out loud what you are doing. I think the purpose is to show that you were doing the work yourself rather than prompting an AI.

I guess there are also software screen recorders and maybe there’s a way to log X events (keystrokes and mouse movement) if that approach is ok with both of you.