(or, proof that I’m a riot at parties)

Take-home message: in my opinion, it’s better to send feedback on drafts as typed lists rather than using the “comment” feature in word processors.

Most people use Microsoft Word or Google Docs for writing and editing written documents. I think these tools are great. (Actually, I don’t think that about Microsoft Word! But I think Google Docs is excellent for collaborating on projects.)

These two word-processing tools have a comment feature that is frequently used by colleagues for giving the author feedback. I think this causes unnecessary difficulty, and I think there is a better way.

Basically, in my opinion, the best way to send feedback is as a list of specific, actionable suggestions, each accompanied by an explanation. The reason is that a list like this is much easier to get an overview of—I can just skim the list and I immediately know how much work there is for me to do. I can tick them off one by one, or respond with additional questions with a list of my own. This also lets you group your suggestions into categories like “General suggestions” / “Specific suggestions”, or “High priority” / “Low priority”. Furthermore, if an author receives a list of suggested changes from each of multiple reviewers, they can combine and prioritise these lists themselves.

In my experience when writing documents, receiving feedback in a list like this is much less cumbersome than the process of responding to comments on documents. Comments on documents are peppered throughout a document and often need to be expanded, so you can’t get a good idea of how much work there is just by looking at them. If you need to respond to a comment, you have to keep the comment open, so it’s hard to tell what comments are “things I need to do” vs “things that I might need to do, pending the reviewer’s answer”. Especially when there are multiple reviewers, this can lead to entire conversations happening in the comments section of a document (which also makes it harder to find that conversation in the future if you need it for whatever reason, though that’s a separate point!). This basically adds an unnecessary mental tax to the process of writing a document—sending your suggestions as an ordered list means we can avoid this tax. And who doesn’t love avoiding tax?!

An exception is the “suggestion” feature in Google Docs or Word. This lets you make the suggested change for the author, meaning that all the author needs to do is either accept or reject the suggestion—this keeps the author’s mental burden to an absolute minimum. You can also respond to your own suggestions to provide short explanations of the proposed change.

In turn, an author can make writing feedback lists as easy as possible for the reviewers by including page numbers, section numbers, and/or line numbers on the draft when sharing.

(This is just my opinion, and I know different people have different preferred ways of working! But I think that 80% of the time, the use of the “comments” feature is more people being stuck with the default way of working, rather than people making a conscious choice to work this way.)