Structured feedback form

Some guidance for how to provide someone with feedback on written documents

Purpose: To provide a list of questions for someone to ask themselves or others after reading a fellowship application to help provide actionable feedback.

Rationale: People writing/applying/doing anything are often told to “get feedback” on their work. Feedback is, of course, a wonderful thing and can greatly enhance your work. However, it is often the case that you get a lot of well-meaning but conflicting advice that you are left to parse through. One reason is that while feedback is often prescribed, people aren’t really given any instruction on how to give feedback, and so things tend to meander.

Anyway, the idea here is to give some ideas on how to structure feedback with the aim of making feedback more efficient and useful. It is geared towards fellowship applications but probably applies to other grants and papers as well. Feedback on how to give feedback is more than welcome! :)

Okay, so you are reviewing something…

Pre-question to ask the writer: Have you gone through this writing checklist yourself, and also done a self-assessment using this document?

It is important that the writer has gone through at least some self-improvement first to clean up weak writing and thinking. Use AI tools to help you.

Now read the first page and, for yourself, write down your answer to each of the following in your own words:

1. What is the overarching problem, and why is it important? (e.g., cancer is bad and kills people.)

2. What is the specific problem? (i.e., what is the specific gap in knowledge?)

3. Why has this gap not been filled to date?

4. What is new about the proposed approach that will help fill this gap?

5. If that gap is filled, what will the impact be?

Great! This set of answers, in various forms, is basically the research proposal. A short version of these answers should be the aims page/abstract. A longer version is the research proposal itself. If any of the answers are not clear to you, then note that lack of clarity down and tell the author “It wasn’t clear to me what is new about the proposed approach that will help fill this gap”. Essentially, that’s it! Just keep asking these questions until the answers to all of them are clear. Your value as a reader is also to provide a fresh perspective on things that the author might think are perfectly obvious but, to others, may be totally opaque.

Look at this annotated aims page for an example of trying to answer these questions. Also, here’s an annotated NSF grant that I think is helpful 1, 2.