Your materials
Lay out what you brought. Anything missing is a hole in the letter before you have written a word — and unlike a memo, a response letter cannot route around a gap, because each comment has to be answered on its own terms.
What a response letter has to do
Assessment criteria
| Criterion | What it means | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | Restate → action → locate, for every comment, in that order | 30% |
| Tense | Present perfect for the action taken; past simple for dated history; never a date on a present perfect | 25% |
| Register | Hedged where genuinely uncertain, exact everywhere else; disagreement carried by we would note, not by assertion | 25% |
| Completeness | Every comment answered — including the one you disagree with — with nothing left for the reviewer to infer | 20% |
Note the weight on register. A letter can be flawless in structure and tense and still fail, because a reviewer who feels contradicted reads the next submittal harder. That is not fairness or unfairness; it is simply what happens, and it is why we would note that is worth as much in this letter as the present perfect is.
Plan the letter
On one sheet, before writing — one row per comment:
- The comment number and your restatement of it
- Whether you agree, disagree, or partly both
- The action taken, in the present perfect
- The sheet and delta where it now appears
- For any disagreement: your evidence, and the even-if
- Anything attached — tables, survey, calculations
Write the letter
Portfolio piece 8 of 10
Silverwood Drive · response to plan check · addressed to the Building Division
Write the letter you would actually send with the resubmittal.
- Number your responses to match their comment numbers. Never renumber, never merge two into one.
- 300–400 words. Comment 2 will be the longest and comment 1 the shortest — that asymmetry is correct.
- Every response ends with a locator. No exceptions, including the one you disagree with.
- Read it aloud before calling it done. Every hedge you hear over a measured fact comes out.
Lesson 1, revisited
Put the three answers you wrote in Lesson 1 beside the letter and answer:
- How many of the Lesson 1 answers located the change on a sheet? How many now?
- Did you restate any comment in Lesson 1?
- What did you do with comment 2 then, and what do you do with it now?
- Were the three answers the same length in Lesson 1? Are they now?
A final check on the unit. Each sentence has one error.
1. The impervious surface table has been revised on 14 December 2023.
2. I relocated the rear wall.
3. Comment 2 said that the wall exceeded four feet.
4. The rear wall is approximately four feet at its highest point.
5. The turf has been itemised separately, as you should have seen.
Unit 8 complete
You can now: answer a correction list in writing so that each response can be closed out on first reading; describe a logged change in the tense that says it is done; disagree with a reviewer in a way that gives them a way to agree; and scope a disclaimer so it protects you without disarming your own evidence. That is the B2 can-do statement for this unit, and it is signed off.
Next unit: the client conversation — presenting a design, handling objections, and negotiating scope and budget without losing the design.
Homework before Unit 9. Bring the revisions logs from all four sets. For each entry, mark whether it was driven by a plan checker or by the client. The client-driven ones are the raw material for Unit 9 — every one of them was a conversation before it was a cloud.