Remember that your reviewers should be acting as coaches, not judges, and that their job is to help you improve your essay as much as possible. Listen to and read their comments carefully. If you don’t understand a particular suggestion, ask for clarification, examples, and so on. Remember, too, that reviewers are commenting on your writing, not on you, so be open and responsive to what they recommend. But you are the final authority on your essay; you will decide which suggestions to follow and which to disregard.

You may find that different readers do not always agree on what is effective or ineffective in your writing. In addition, you may find that you simply do not agree with their advice. In examining responses to your writing, you can often proceed efficiently by looking first for areas of agreement (everyone was confused by this sentence—I’d better revise it) or strong disagreement (one person said my conclusion was “perfect,” and someone else said it “didn’t conclude”—better look carefully at that paragraph again).