Seeking Feedback from Others

Setting goals

Before you ask a reader to review your draft, it helps to have a good sense of what kind of feedback would be most helpful for your revision. Consider the following questions to establish goals:

• What is the writing task?

This can affect who you want to ask for feedback, whether it’s an instructor, a mentor, or a classmate.

• When is the due date?

Try to build enough time for both your reader to compose their feedback and for you to consider their comments and revise your draft.

• What are the goals of this assignment?

Start with the assignment prompt, job posting, or application guidelines, but don’t forget to consider feedback you may have received from your course instructor or grader on previous assignments. It can also be helpful to look at examples of successful submissions from the recent past. Pay attention to both the generic conventions and the possible nuances provided by the assignment prompt, the job posting, or the application guidelines.

By responding the following questions, you can put together some goals for the kind of revision you’d like to prioritize on this draft. In other words, ask yourself:

What kind of feedback am I looking for?

Types of Feedback

Consider the following classification for the type of feedback you are looking for:

• Global or Big Picture Feedback: this type focuses on the logic of your argument, how you develop your ideas more fully, and the organization of your draft. This kind of feedback generally constitutes an overview of the text, usually written at the beginning or at the end of the draft.
• Local or Sentence–level Feedback: this type focuses on editing for concision, avoiding repetition, following grammatical expectations, among others. This kind of feedback con be located either in the text (through bolded words in brackets) or in its margin.

Potential Reviewers

After you have established your goals and reflected on types of feedback, you should decide who to ask for feedback. That means, with your goals in mind, consider who might be best to help you achieve those objectives in your revision. Here is a list of potential “reviewers”:

• Classmates:

As they are engaging with the subject matter for your course, this can be a good opportunity to exchange drafts and learn from each other’s work.

• Friends or family members:

As they know you very well, they can be excellent readers for personal statements or cover letters, which require you to tell the hiring or search committee who you are as a person.

• Professors or course instructors:

They are hoping to help you learn and succeed. While they may not be able to revise complete drafts, they may be open to discussing an outline of a paper or a thesis statement. If they are writing you letters of recommendation, they may be expecting to receive your personal statement or cover letter in advance, to help them prepare to write about your qualifications.

• Writing Center instructors:

We are here to help with exactly this kind of revision! We’re happy to help UW-Madison students at any stage of the writing process, including offering feedback on complete drafts based on the goals you share with us beforehand [1]

Questions for Potential Reviewers

Once you have a reader in mind, generate questions that will help you get the kind of feedback you’re looking for. However, keep in mind that you might receive feedback on areas you have not expected or anticipated: remember to be open, not defensive. In order to formulate questions, it often helps to keep these inquiries direct but open-ended, so that your reader can give you more feedback than simply “yes” or “no.” Consider the following questions:

• What parts of my personal statement do the best job at making me seem like a successful candidate?

In this question, you draw the attention toward the specific rhetorical move or discursive strategy that is the most persuasive in your text.

• Are there any places where my transitions between paragraphs seem abrupt right now? I’m especially worried about these two places in my draft.

Transitions are especially relevant in terms of the coherence and the cohesion of the text, that is, the agreement or correspondence between content and form, respectively.

• What would you say is the argument of my paper, in your own words?

In this question, your reader will be attentive to the clarity, complexity, and intelligibility of the argument/claim/assumption that you have stated or suggested in the text.

• I know a lot of my sentences start with “I want…” Do you have any recommendations for other ways to phrase these sentences?

This question points out how the repetition of certain expressions and how they are arranged might produce monotony and redundancy. monotony. That is, this comment relates to how the words you choose and how you arrange them generate redundancy.

Format of the Feedback

Think about what format will best help you revise your writing, while keeping in mind the other obligations that your reader(s) might have. In other words, reflect on how the reader will provide feedback, and the ways in which the comments or changes will be accessible for both the author and the reviewer. Here is a list of tentative questions:

• Would it be helpful to get a few quick bullet points from your reader, sent over email?
• Would you like your reader to go through and make comments directly on your draft?
• Would it be more helpful to have track changes as a form of feedback?
• Would it be helpful to sit down with your reader in person and talk about your writing together? Could you talk over the phone? Over videochat?
• Would it be helpful to plan a peer-feedback session, or participate in a writing group with our classmates or colleagues?

The Importance of Time

As you might have noticed, in order to seek feedback from others, you need to plan ahead. Try to give yourself enough time to:

• Let your reader come up with a response to your draft.
• Meet with your reader or read through their feedback.
• Fully consider the recommendations they make.
• Incorporate these suggestions before you submit your manuscript. 

This may mean building a couple of weeks for revision into your writing plans! Meet with your reader or read through their feedback, fully consider the recommendations they make,

and finally, incorporate these suggestions before you submit your writing.

Thank your Reader!

Don’t forget to thank your reader! They’ve taken your work seriously enough to try and help you improve it, so let them know that you appreciate their hard work, and that you’re going to take their comments into consideration!

[1] Although our primary audience for one-to-one instruction is enrolled UW-Madison students, we sometimes can provide limited support to alumni during periods of lower demand. If you are a UW-Madison alumnus or a member of the Madison community, you can meet with one of our instructors through Madison Writing Assistance. If that is not your case, you can always reach out to your academic institution or your local library, seek additional advice in the Writer’s Handbook.