In their book Thanks for the Feedback, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen identify three primary kinds of feedback: appreciation, coaching, and evaluation. According to Stone and Heen, knowing which kind of feedback will be most helpful in a given situation is a key element in giving feedback well. Likewise, understanding which kind of feedback is being given can help you make the most of a feedback opportunity.

Appreciation feedback is mostly about relationships and connections (Heen and Stone 31). When your boss says, “I’m so glad you’re on the team!” That’s appreciation feedback. In peer review of writing, appreciation feedback typically lets the writer know that they’re doing a good job and are, as the name implies, appreciated. This kind of feedback is sometimes overlooked in a writing-critique situation, where the emphasis tends to be on finding improvements to be made and identifying errors to correct. However, as anyone can attest, constant negative feedback is damaging. Appreciation feedback is just as important as other types of feedback in order to acknowledge the efforts of the writer and help them  gain more confidence. Everybody enjoys hearing when they are doing something well.

Coaching feedback begins to look more like constructive feedback. You use coaching feedback when you want to help someone improve, learn, or change (Heen and Stone, 32). In writing, this type of feedback looks at the entire product and gives helpful information to make the writing stronger. While positive, reinforcing comments can be made here, this is where a peer will begin to coach the writer to make changes to strengthen the overall paper.

Finally, there is evaluation feedback (Heen and Stone, 33). Evaluation feedback is a ranking, rating, or judgement of a person’s performance.Evaluation lets you know where you stand against a given set of standards or expectations. Though the majority of the time this feedback is given by an instructor, peer-review should also provide evaluation feedback. Typically, evaluation review is considered feedback that is set against a standard; in classroom settings, this means a rubric. Even if the peer is not the one who will give the final grade, the rubric should be used as a basis for comments and critiques. If the rubric says that ten percent of the grade will be based on the presence of a strong thesis statement, a peer should use the rubric and the guidelines for a thesis statement and give evaluation feedback, such as:

“Ten percent of our grade is based on the thesis statement. A thesis statement should tell the reader the topic, stance, and direction of the points. Here, the thesis gives the topic and the direction, but there is no stance. You could make this stronger by saying…”

Giving strong evaluation feedback can give a writer a specific focus to work towards. Instead of saying something like, “Your thesis needs work,” the example above tells the writer what is missing and what to work on specifically. In addition, it gives the writer an explanation that this feedback is coming directly from the rubric that the instructor will be grading from, so it needs to be prioritized and taken seriously if the writer wants a stronger grade.