How to give feedback on a draft.

A draft is a question. It asks: is this what you meant? Feedback is the answer, and the most common answer, everywhere, is a mood. “Not feeling it.” “Something's missing.” “Can we make it more premium?” Each of those is honest, and none of them tells the writer which sentence to change.

Read it twice: once as you, once as them

The first read is yours. Mark everything, enjoy the irritation, send nothing. The second read belongs to your reader: the person you named in the brief, on their phone, a second after doing something else. Send only the notes that survive the second read. Half of the first ones were about taste, and your customer does not share your taste. They share your problem.

Point at a sentence, not at the draft

A note about the whole draft is almost always a note about one paragraph, spread thin. “The tone is off” usually means the third paragraph sounds like a brochure. Say that. Highlight it, quote it back, put the comment next to it. A writer can fix a sentence in a minute. A writer handed “the tone is off” will rewrite the four paragraphs that were fine as well, and now you have five to check.

Describe the problem. Leave the fix, unless it's a fact

“This line sounds like a boast” is a gift. “Change it to: we are Gujarat's most trusted name” is a rewrite, and it usually brings back the exact phrase the writer took out on purpose. Say precisely what is wrong and let the writer solve it.

The exception is anything only you know: a fact, a name, a price, a date, a line legal insists on. Write those in, word for word. Facts are yours to give. Phrasing is theirs to earn.

Put every note in one of three piles

• Wrong. A fact, a figure, a spelling of a name, a claim your industry does not allow. Not up for discussion, and a good writer is grateful for every one.
• Off. Accurate, but it does not sound like you, or it says the right thing to the wrong person. Explain why in one line.
• Preference. You would have said it differently. Label these honestly. Some are worth changing. Some are just how you would say it, and the draft is not meant to sound like you writing at midnight.

Labelled like this, the writer knows what must change, what to argue for and what to leave alone. Unlabelled, every note looks like the first pile, and the draft gets sanded down until nothing in it could offend anyone. Nothing in it will be remembered either.

The notes that start round three

“Make it more premium.” “Can it be catchier?” “Add some energy.” “My nephew read it and said…” Each of these produces a new draft, not a better one.

Premium means one thing to a jeweller and another to a gym. Catchy might mean shorter, or a rhyme, or a pun, and it helps to know which. Energy is often a request for exclamation marks, which is a request to sound nervous. The nephew is a real reader only if your customers are also nineteen.

Swap each one for something the writer can check: “shorter than this”, “one line a customer might repeat to a friend”, “less formal than our current site”. The same trick works in the brief, for the same reason.

One voice, one document

If three people read the draft, collect their notes in one file and settle the disagreements before it goes back. Otherwise the writer receives a marketing head who wants it shorter and a founder who wants the 1998 award mentioned, and has to decide whose job to protect. That is not a writing decision, and the writer should not be the one making it. It is why the brief asks for one name to sign it off.

Say what worked

Not to be kind, although kind is allowed. A writer who does not know which line landed may cut it in the next round while fixing something nearby. One sentence, “keep the second paragraph exactly as it is”, protects the best thing in the draft. It costs nothing and saves you the version where it quietly disappears.

How long it should take

Good feedback on a five-hundred-word draft fits on half a page and takes about fifteen minutes. If it runs to three pages, the problem is upstream: the draft answered a different brief, and that is one conversation, not forty comments. If the voice is what keeps coming up, write the voice down once, so you stop correcting it one sentence at a time.

Send notes like these and round two is usually the last one. If a writer cannot work from them, that tells you something useful too.