← Chapter 9
Professional Writing · Chapter 9

The Comment Clinic

A comment that gets acted on carries three things: what is wrong, where, and a possible fix or the question that would produce one. Pick a review round, click a trouble spot in the draft, and build a comment part by part — the writer receiving it reacts to exactly what you gave them, and no more.
1 · Name the round
Label the level before every round, and hold the line when someone returns the wrong layer.
2 · Pick a trouble spot
Draft v0.4 of the falls policy. Three things are wrong with this passage, and they are not wrong in the same way.
The comment as it lands
This is what appears in the margin of somebody else’s document at 6 p.m. on a Thursday.
RYou · reviewerunlabelled
Pick a trouble spot on the left, then build a comment.
—
rounds to
get it fixed
CChen has not received anything yet.