Kindly Review

12DIYer

No matter how much you've listened to your reviewer's style and words, they can't help but add their two cents to every round of review. Your work always comes back full of changes even when you've engaged the reviewer in every process step. Does this sound familiar? Well, you have a DIYer in your review process.

With this feedback style, the project can be completely rewritten with little time to collaborate on a rewrite. The large number of changes makes the creator feel like their voice is lost. For that reason, this is one of the most destructive feedback styles.

My favorite DIYers are the folks who are so incredibly busy but can't help taking a ton of time to change everything so it sounds like they wrote it. One DIYer we worked with was a one‐person organization. She wore all the hats as executive director, fundraiser, and accountant. She invited us to help her produce her communications consistently to keep the messages flowing to her supporters. Despite every trick we tried – writing a style guide, using content she had already written on the website, keeping the messages simple – she constantly changed our content to fit her evaluation of quality at that moment. She would even rewrite the things she had approved in the past. She added so much time to the project clock by not trusting the creators to do their job.

This style is so much work. It's work for ...