How to revise an essay based on feedback, comment by comment
9 min read · updated 2026-10-21
To revise an essay based on feedback, give every comment its own line with four parts: the rubric criterion it belongs to, the passage it points at, one action you can finish in a sitting, and a test that shows the action is done. Merge lines that share a cause, put them in order, and reread the descriptor after each change. Your instructor still decides the grade.
What does revising an essay based on feedback involve?
Revising an essay based on feedback means giving every comment you received its own line, matched to a rubric criterion, with the passage to change and a test that shows the change is done.
What you end up with is a checklist written for one paper and one rubric. Each line starts from something a reader wrote, so it names a place to work and a point where you can stop.
This guide covers turning comments into tasks. To choose which task comes first, use our guide to prioritizing essay revisions with a rubric. To score a draft yourself before anyone comments on it, see how to grade your own essay with a rubric.
What feedback needs before you can act on it
A draft can come back covered in comments and still leave you unsure what to type first. In a 2006 paper on feedback in higher education, David Nicol and Debra Macfarlane-Dick summarize Sadler’s (1989) argument that a student needs three things to benefit from feedback. The first is a sense of what good performance is. The second is a way to compare the current work with it, and the third is a way to act to close the gap (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006).
In those terms, a comment such as “unclear” mostly covers the second. It marks where the draft falls short and leaves the standard and the next step to you. A checklist line fills in both. The rubric descriptor states the standard, and the action with its done-when test describes how you will close the gap.
Writing the plan down has some support as well. A systematic review of research on how students engage with feedback found some evidence, much of it from students’ own accounts, that encouraging or requiring learners to write an action plan can help them engage with it (Winstone et al., 2017). That evidence concerns engagement, and it does not show that a plan raises grades. The done-when column in this guide follows the action-planning sheet in the Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit, written by two of the same researchers. The sheet asks, “How will you know you have achieved the target?” (Winstone & Nash, 2016).
Turn each comment into a checklist line
Work from a copy of the commented draft and a blank document or table. Plan on one sitting for the first pass. Purdue OWL’s guide to interpreting instructor feedback also suggests restating each comment in your own words and making a checklist, so that the key points do not get lost when a deadline leaves no time for every comment. The steps below add the rubric to that list.
- Collect every comment in one place. Copy margin notes, rubric marks, the end comment, peer notes and any tool report word for word. Label each with its source and where it appeared.
- Match each comment to a criterion. Find the rubric row it belongs to and copy the descriptor for the level you are aiming at, not the level you received. A comment that fits no row may concern an assignment requirement, such as length or a required source. Keep it and mark it that way.
- Find the passage. Write a paragraph number or the first words of the sentence. An end comment often has no location, so look for every place it could apply and list them.
- Write one action per line. Start with a verb you can do: explain, cite, move, cut, define, add. “Improve analysis” is a topic. “Explain what the ridership figure in paragraph 3 shows about late-night demand” is an action.
- Write the done-when test. Describe something you could point to on the page, or a check you can run, when the action is finished. If you cannot describe it, the action is still too vague.
- Merge and order. Lines that share a cause become one task with several passages. Then decide the order. The prioritizing guide walks through weights and dependencies.
- Write questions for anything left. If a comment still makes no sense to you, write the question you will ask, tied to the passage: “In paragraph 4 you wrote ‘develop.’ Do you mean more evidence, or more explanation of the evidence I have?”
A worked example with seven comments
The paper, the rubric rows and every comment below are invented for this guide. The paper argues that a city should extend late-night bus service near a campus. Its rubric has five criteria: thesis and argument, evidence and analysis, organization, sources and citation, and style and mechanics.
| Comment and where it appeared | Criterion | Passage | Action | Done when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| “Thesis?” (margin, paragraph 1) | Thesis and argument | Last two sentences of paragraph 1 | Add a sentence that names the extension the essay proposes and its main reason | A reader who stops after paragraph 1 can say what the essay proposes and why |
| “How does this support your point?” (margin, paragraph 3) | Evidence and analysis | The ridership figure in paragraph 3 | Explain what the figure shows about late-night demand | The figure is followed by a sentence that connects it to the claim |
| “Your analysis is thin in places.” (end comment) | Evidence and analysis | No location given. Paragraphs 3, 4 and 6 end on a quotation or a number | Add the explanation each of those paragraphs is missing | No body paragraph ends on a quotation or a number |
| “Cite the ridership data.” (rubric row, sources) | Sources and citation | Paragraph 3 and the reference list | Add the in-text citation and a matching reference entry | The figure’s citation matches an entry in the reference list |
| “I got lost between paragraphs 4 and 5.” (peer reviewer) | Organization | First sentence of paragraph 5 | Write a transition that links cost (paragraph 4) to safety (paragraph 5) | The first sentence of paragraph 5 names both points |
| “Awk.” (margin, paragraph 5) | Style and mechanics | The second sentence of paragraph 5 | Read the sentence aloud and rewrite it, splitting it in two if it carries two ideas | Each resulting sentence carries one idea, and you can read it aloud without restarting |
| “Strong counterargument section.” (end comment) | Thesis and argument | Paragraph 7 | Keep it, and reread it after the thesis changes | Paragraph 7 still answers an objection to the revised thesis |
The two evidence comments share a cause. Paragraphs 3, 4 and 6 end on a quotation or a number, so they become one task with three passages. Which line goes first is a separate decision, and the prioritizing guide shows how to make it.
The last row is praise. It still earns a line, because a revision elsewhere can break a section that worked.
Margin shorthand, one-word comments and unmarked rubric rows
Margin marks are shorthand, and no single standard defines them. Farmingdale State College’s writing center guide to editing comments reads “awk” as awkward, meaning the sentence structure needs work, and the paragraph sign (¶) as a place to start a new paragraph. The University of Southampton Library’s feedback decoder lists “???” alongside “Don’t know what you mean here” in its section on editing and proofreading. If your instructor or course provides its own key, that key wins.
Comments such as “unclear,” “vague” or “so what?” name a reaction without a fix. Turn each one into three questions:
- Which sentence or paragraph is it attached to?
- Which rubric criterion describes what that passage should do?
- What would the passage contain if it met the descriptor at the level you are aiming for?
The answer to the third question is usually your action. If you cannot answer it, that is the question to take to office hours or a writing tutor. Our explanation of rubric phrases covers descriptor wording such as “analysis rather than summary” and “synthesizes sources.”
A rubric row can also come back marked at a level with no comment at all. Then the rubric itself is the comment. Put the descriptor you received next to the descriptor for the level you are aiming at, and write down what that one asks for that yours does not. That gap becomes the action, and the places in your paper where it shows become the passages.
Use the feedback on your next assignment
Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick argue that feedback should help students recognize their next steps “both during production and in relation to the next assignment.” The UNC Writing Center’s page on getting feedback suggests reading all of it even after a satisfactory grade. Careful reading, the page says, “may help you see patterns of error in your writing that you need to address.”
Some lines belong to one paper. The transition between cost and safety in paragraph 5 will not exist in your next paper. Other lines describe a habit: ending paragraphs on a quotation, leaving numbers uncited, citing a source in the text that never reaches the reference list. Copy those into a short feedback log, grouped by the criterion they affect, and run them as checks before you submit the next paper. The University of Southampton Library calls the same idea a writing feedback tracker and offers templates for one.
Keep the log short enough to run before every submission. Drop a check once it stops catching anything.
Mistakes that waste a revision pass
A margin comment marks one instance of a problem. If the same problem shows up in other paragraphs, the comment applies there too, so search the draft for the pattern before you tick the line off. Purdue’s guide asks students to look for these patterns for the same reason.
When a comment says “develop,” more sentences are not automatically more development. Check whether the new sentences explain something the old ones did not.
If you disagree with a comment, keep its line and write your reason next to it. Should you discuss the draft with your instructor later, you will know which comments you set aside and why.
Comments from different readers also carry different weight. Your instructor is the reader who will apply the rubric. A peer’s note shows where one reader struggled, and a tool report is a prediction. When they pull in different directions, the rubric and the assignment instructions decide.
Check the revised draft against the same rubric
After the revision, run each done-when test, then reread the descriptor for every criterion you touched. Read the paragraphs around each change too, because a new thesis can leave an old transition pointing the wrong way.
OnRubric can check a draft against its rubric and then, within 30 days of that first check, recheck the revised version. The recheck keeps the same rubric. For each criterion it shows the new predicted range, how far the middle of the range moved, and the level the criterion was at before, with the sentences it quotes as evidence. Use the quotes to see whether the passage you revised is the one the criterion now rests on. The range is a prediction, and your instructor decides the grade. Follow your course’s rules about uploading papers and rubrics to AI tools.