How to Tell the Difference Between a Note and an Opinion
Not every note in your coverage deserves the same response. A practical framework for sorting real script notes from one reader's personal taste.
You've gotten two notes on the same script that flatly contradict each other. One reader says the opening is too slow. Another says it's the strongest thing in the draft. Both of them read carefully. Both of them meant it.
So which one's right?
Here's the uncomfortable answer: sometimes neither. Sometimes both. And sometimes the real note is buried underneath both of them, and neither reader quite landed on it. Learning to tell a genuine note from a reader's personal opinion is one of the most useful skills a writer can build, and almost nobody teaches it directly. So let's get into it.
What actually makes a note a note
A real note has three things going for it, and if you start checking for these, the sorting gets a lot easier.
It's sympathetic to what you're trying to do. A good note evaluates the story against its own goals, not against the story the reader personally would've written. “This joke undercuts the tension you just built” is a note. “I'd have cut the comedy entirely” is (probably) a preference.
It's tied to something specific on the page. Real notes point at a cause. “The middle section drags” isn't quite there yet on its own… “the middle section drags because your protagonist stops making choices for three scenes in a row” is the same note with the diagnosis attached, and now you actually know what to do with it.
It's repeatable. A different careful reader, working independently, would likely bump into something similar — even if they'd phrase it completely differently. This is the big one. If a note is really about the page and not about the person reading it, it tends to show up more than once.
What actually makes an opinion an opinion
Opinions aren't bad, and they're not something to dismiss outright. They're just a different animal, and treating them like structural notes is where writers get themselves in trouble.
Genre or tone preference dressed up as a rule. “I don't love slow burns” is a taste. “The burn doesn't earn its ending” is a note. Same instinct, very different amount of usable information.
A reader evaluating the script they wanted instead of the one you wrote. This one's sneaky because it can sound completely legitimate. “I wish this leaned harder into the horror” might be a genuine gap… or it might just mean that reader wanted a horror script and you wrote a thriller with horror elements. Worth asking which.
A single stylistic preference presented as an absolute. “I'd never open on a monologue” isn't a note about your script. It's a note about that reader's personal toolkit.
The three-question test
When a note doesn't sit right and you can't tell why, run it through these:
- Does this point to something specific on the page, or to a general feeling? “Something felt off in act two” is a feeling. “Your protagonist agrees to the plan without any resistance” is a page-specific observation you can act on.
- Is the reader evaluating the story you wrote, or the story they would've written? This is the hardest one to self-assess honestly, because both versions can sound equally confident.
- Would a second careful reader likely land in the same place? You don't always get to test this in real time, but it's worth asking yourself. If you can picture three different readers all tripping on the same beat, that's not a coincidence.
Two notes that look identical but aren't
“I didn't buy the ending” could genuinely be either one. That's what makes it the hardest note to receive, because on its own it doesn't tell you which kind it is.
The move is to ask why, specifically. Not defensively… genuinely. “What part of it didn't you buy? The choice the character made, or the way we got there?” If the answer points to something on the page (a setup that never paid off, a decision that came out of nowhere), you've got a note. If the answer is closer to “I just wanted a different ending,” you've got an opinion, and that's fine — you're allowed to keep your ending.
When it's genuinely both
This happens more than you'd think, and it's worth naming honestly. A note can start as personal taste and still reveal something real once you dig into it. A reader who says “I wanted more romance” might just want more romance. Or they might be circling a genuine hole: the relationship that's supposed to be the emotional spine of your story isn't doing enough work on the page, and “more romance” is the closest language they had for it.
Don't throw out a note just because it started as an opinion. Ask why one more time before you file it away.
What to do with the sorting once you've done it
You don't have to resolve every single note into a clean category before you touch the page again. That's not really the goal here. The goal is the habit itself — every time you sort a note into “structural” or “taste,” you get a little better at reading your own work with some distance, which is the actual skill underneath all of this.
Keep the notes you can't fully sort. Revisit them after a draft or two. A note that reads as pure opinion today sometimes reveals itself as the real thing once you've got enough distance from the page to see it clearly.
If you take one thing from this: the question isn't “is this note right or wrong.” It's “what is this note actually about — my script, or this reader.” Once you can answer that, you know exactly what to do with it.
For us, this is a big part of why we're careful about how we write our own notes at dev|cut. — every finding is tied to something specific on the page, not a general impression, because that's the only kind of note that's actually useful to act on.
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[Soon] The story continues… — Brian Hanford, Writer & Founder, dev|cut.™ · devcut.io
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