TL;DR — share your reaction to each part as you experience it

2 min readSep 6, 2016

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Note: If you want to practice on this post, I’d love your feedback!

When a writer asks you for feedback on their writing, what they really want is to know is:

What’s going on in your head? What are you thinking? How do you feel?

When you agree to give feedback on a piece of writing, your job is to notice what’s happening in your head and share it with the author.

The best way to do this, in my opinion, is simple: leave notes on everything. In other words, try to give the writer your play-by-play reaction to every part of their piece.

Here are some examples of what that looks like:

• When you see something shocking leave a comment that says “Wow!” or even just “😮”.
• When you see something confusing tell them you’re not sure what it means.
• When you notice your attention starting to fade, leave a comment that says “I’m not sure why, but I lost energy here and probably would start skimming or leave”.

When most people give feedback, they just tell the author “I liked it!” and maybe say a thing about a part that stood out to them. It’s understandable that you’re trying to be nice, but “nice” isn’t useful. You’re giving author very little information about what they really want to know: what was actually happening in your head when you were reading.

Leaving lots of notes makes it easier to be brutally honest. You can leave a bunch of negative comments in the substance of the work, but get back to them with some high-level encouragement at the end. For example, you could say: “Overall it’s a really interesting topic and with some tweaks I think people will really love this!” Now you can be honest without being discouraging.

By the way, this trick doesn’t just work on essays. It’s also great for all kinds of copy: marketing websites, landing pages, emails, etc.

So, next time you’re asked for feedback, why not give it a shot?

If you do, let me know how it goes! 😉