Encouraging Student Writers through Feedback: How Not to be Reviewer 2

If your writing has been subjected to academic peer review, you’ve likely experienced the scourge that is “Reviewer 2”: a reviewer who is uncharitable and nitpicky, cluttering one’s paper with irrelevant, unhelpful, or sanctimonious nastygrams concerned more with asserting their own expertise than helping strengthen your writing. Most academic writers know the sinking feeling of opening reviewer comments to find a wall of criticism, or the frustration of spending hours addressing feedback that misses a paper's actual contribution. But one silver lining is that, as teachers, we can apply lessons learned from these taxing peer reviews to improve our own commenting practices. By considering features that make reviewer feedback generous rather than grating, we can identify key strategies for encouraging student writers: acknowledging their efforts and successes, centering their perspectives, and commenting to coach rather than judge. 

Lesson 1: Acknowledge Authors’ Efforts

The process of submitting papers for academic publication can be harrowing, marked by anxiety and frustration for authors. After a lengthy and effortful process of developing a manuscript, it’s sent into the void of anonymous review, a process over which authors have little control.

Generous reviewers, acknowledging the trials and tribulations of the writing and publication processes, typically begin by thanking the author(s) for sharing their work and noting strengths and contributions of the manuscript. Throughout their reviews, they offer feedback that is balanced, noting strengths as well as areas for improvement in each section of the text. In contrast, a Reviewer 2 may omit praise entirely or include only a dismissive “Thank you for the opportunity to review this manuscript.” Their pedantic comments leave authors feeling like their efforts have been wasted on an unsympathetic audience.

Although anxious reviewees may breeze past reviewer praise, steeling themselves for the critique to come, authentic and specific compliments nevertheless play an important role in setting a collegial, respectful tone for a review. They also produce a more accurate review that guides authors to particular areas for improvement, rather than (often inaccurately) suggesting they need to throw out the full paper and start again.

Like authors submitting manuscripts to a journal, student writers often feel they’ve sent their writing into a black box, uncertain of the outcome. In responding to their writing, we can set a productive tone for revision by offering authentic praise for the writer’s effort and noting specific strengths of their text, just as a generous reviewer might. Throughout your feedback, interweave critiques with observations about stronger choices or components of the paper, helping buoy student writers even as you guide their attention towards areas for improvement. Consider these strategies:

• Read first to understand, not to critique. Academics’ training in close reading and critique cuts against generous feedback practices, and academics often read student texts even more skeptically than their colleagues’. Deliberately orienting ourselves towards understanding and appreciation can be an important step to engaging authentically and charitably with student texts.
• Offer specific praise: “As a reader, my favorite part of the paper was ___.” “I especially appreciated the way that you ___.” “I’m nodding my head here.”
• Credit successes to the author—“I love how you chose to _____”—but focus critiques on the paper—“I had a hard time seeing how the second paragraph connected to the first.”

Lesson 2: Center the Author’s Perspective

One central frustration with Reviewer 2s is the sense that they hijack our writing for their own purposes, asking us to address pedantic objections or shoehorn in extraneous references. As reviewers, of course, we see the relevance of our feedback—but as an author, it’s easy to feel like your goals and purposes have been overridden by external demands. (Just ask a frustrated Yang et al. (2024), whose manuscript included this jibe: “As strongly requested by the reviewers, here we cite some references [[35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40], [41], [42], [43], [44], [45], [46], [47]] although they are completely irrelevant to the present work.”) 

Many students already feel at the mercy of faculty whims—after all, faculty often set the topic, genre, context, and purpose of their writing. When met with a barrage of directives, many students feel disheartened and disengaged, feeling their writing will never meet faculty expectations. If given the opportunity to revise, they may fall into the familiar trap of treating comments as meaningless checkboxes, rather than engaging in more substantive revision.

How can faculty disrupt this pattern? 

• Give students opportunities to articulate their goals, questions, and concerns about their current draft, and reference these in your feedback: “You mentioned that you want to explain these tricky health concepts to a non-expert audience. With that in mind, I’d encourage you to limit jargon to make your text easier for them to understand (see marginal notes on p. 3 for examples).”
• Frame your response from the perspective of a reader: “Even as someone familiar with these terms, I’m struggling to follow your meaning here.”
• Frame feedback as open-ended questions (“How might using this terminology impact your audience?”). This strategy invites students to identify next steps for revision by engaging in and sharing their rhetorical thinking (“In this spot, I’m intentionally using a few key pieces of jargon to establish credibility”). These responses can even spark useful exchanges (“Ah! In that case, I wonder if defining that language could be helpful—you can invite readers in even while signaling your expertise”).

With each of these strategies, we communicate that we value students’ perspectives and assume they made intentional choices that they might continue to refine, rather than (even unintentionally) suggesting that errors or deviations from our preferences are signs of bumbling inadequacy. We frame our feedback as a perspective to consider, not a dictate from on high. These strategies keep student writers in control and engaged in the writing process, while the instructor takes the role of friendly coach or supporter rather than gatekeeper of grades. 

Lesson 3: Comment to Coach, Not Justify a Judgment

Whether recommending acceptance, resubmission, or rejection, the most helpful reviewers gear their comments toward revisions the authors can make to strengthen their work. Conversely, Reviewer 2s are more likely to deliver academic takedowns designed to justify rejections; the applicability of their feedback is incidental at best. For instance, they may leave comments authors could not possibly address at this stage of the process (“The interview protocol could be strengthened by including additional questions on [my research topic]”), or engage in low-level copy editing that is not relevant to a high-level review process, seemingly wanting to shame authors for minor errors. As a result, authors are left feeling exhausted and defeated before revision has even begun.

Unfortunately, well-intentioned faculty can sometimes fall into the trap of leaving Reviewer 2-like screeds on student work when they use feedback to justify grades. When we view feedback as a spot to justify, rather than coach, we often end up commenting most heavily not on early drafts (when comments can be immediately applied to future writing) but on graded final assignment submissions (where the presence of a grade changes how students read and interpret comments and feedback is challenging to apply to future writing). Faculty may produce exhaustive lists of critiques to document where every point has been subtracted, rather than offering thoughtfully-prioritized recommendations of next steps that will support a student’s writing process.

To avoid this approach, try these strategies:

• Prioritize commenting on early drafts or other scaffolding assignments, so you can catch major missteps early and students can immediately apply your feedback.
• Focus on commenting strategies that are most likely to produce student learning—like identifying 2-3 top areas of focus in each revision—rather than aiming to be comprehensive. In particular, avoid extensively commenting on sentence-level features of writing, especially if you still expect major revisions.
• Make comments actionable—the writer should be able to identify changes that would respond to the feedback, not just feel bad about their writing. You can even make a policy of allowing limited resubmissions to give students opportunities to apply your feedback—and orient you towards highlighting revision opportunities rather than cataloguing errors. 

Conclusion: Critique with Compassion

The ironic undercurrent of Reviewer 2 memes and jokes is that most academics who have peer reviewed have likely been another author’s “Reviewer 2”—particularly early in their reviewing careers. And of course, there is value in vigorous, deep engagement with texts—empty platitudes don’t help writers improve their texts or grow their skills.

Nevertheless, the experience of receiving multiple reviews often highlights the ways that similar or identical feedback—even negative feedback—can be presented in ways that are charitable, thoughtful, and encouraging, or ungenerous, dismissive, and presumptuous. Comments that read as haughty, dismissive, or impatient are likely to make writers bristle defensively, while comments that highlight early wins and illuminate potential for improvement can inspire writers as they undertake the challenging work of revision. Reflecting our own experience as writers receiving reviewer feedback—both good and bad—can help us continually refine our commenting strategies to better support our students.

If you’d like a thinking partner as you refine your commenting strategies, or any other aspect of writing pedagogy, consider scheduling a consultation with a member of the WAC team. For assignment design strategies that make commenting more manageable and meaningful, join us for our upcoming workshop on developing assignment checklists. 

We’d love to hear from you below: what commenting strategies do you use that are generous and generative?

Image credits:

• Cat tearing papers: r/AnimalsBeingJerks
• “This is Reviewer 2”: Academics Say
• “We thank the reviewers for their comments”: John Holbein
• “Painting, the arrival of reviewers comments”: Martin A. Nuñez
• “I couldn’t help but wonder”: She Sciences, “How Not to Be Reviewer Two: A Grad Students Guide to Being an Awesome Peer Reviewer”