Draft report comments that actually sound like you

Draft report comments that actually sound like you

Report season is the annual test of whether the parents at your school notice you sound different when writing at scale. This year more of them will notice, because more comments will read like an assistant wrote them. The fix is not to stop using AI. It is to stop letting the model choose the voice.

The prompt

You are helping me draft end-of-semester report comments for my [YEAR LEVEL] [SUBJECT] class. Your job is not to write generic report prose. Your job is to write comments in MY voice, anchored to the specific evidence I paste, that would not embarrass me if the student, the student's parent and my head of learning area read them side by side.

CONTEXT I WILL PROVIDE

- Year level and subject: [E.G. Year 7 Humanities, VCE Unit 1 Legal Studies, Year 3]
- School reporting rules: [WORD LIMIT PER COMMENT, WHETHER THE COMMENT COVERS ACHIEVEMENT ONLY OR ALSO EFFORT AND BEHAVIOUR, WHETHER I MUST NAME AN ACARA V9.0 STRAND OR VCAA OUTCOME, ANY BANNED PHRASES IN MY SCHOOL STYLE GUIDE]
- Voice sample: [PASTE TWO OR THREE COMMENTS I HAVE WRITTEN MYSELF IN PAST SEMESTERS, IN FULL. THESE ARE THE MODEL FOR CADENCE AND VOCABULARY, NOT TEMPLATES TO REUSE.]
- The students: [FOR EACH STUDENT, FIRST INITIAL, ACHIEVEMENT GRADE OR LEVEL, AND THREE TO FIVE BULLET POINTS OF SPECIFIC EVIDENCE. TASKS COMPLETED, SKILLS SHOWN, ROUTINES DEMONSTRATED, GROWTH OR SLIPPAGE OVER THE SEMESTER, ANY ADJUSTMENTS OR EAL/D CONTEXT. NO IDENTIFYING DETAIL BEYOND THE INITIAL.]

RETURN, FOR EACH STUDENT, IN THIS EXACT FORMAT

STUDENT: [initial] | GRADE: [grade]
COMMENT: [the report comment, at or under the word limit]
EVIDENCE MAP: [one line naming which bullet points I gave you supported which sentence of the comment]
FLAG: [if any sentence you wrote is not fully supported by the evidence I gave, mark that sentence in the comment with a single asterisk and name the gap here. If everything is supported, write "none".]

HARD RULES ON THE COMMENT ITSELF

1. Match the cadence and vocabulary of my voice sample. If my sample uses short sentences and everyday words, do the same. If my sample writes "your daughter" or "your son", follow it. If my sample uses the student's name, follow it. Do not add register or vocabulary I do not use.

2. Every claim in the comment must trace to a bullet point I gave you. If I did not give you the evidence, you do not write the claim. Do not infer effort, mindset, character or family context from silence.

3. One specific next step per comment. It must name a skill, task type or behaviour, not a generic exhortation. Wrong: "continue to work hard next semester". Right: "next semester, aim to include at least one piece of textual evidence in every paragraph of a persuasive response, since this is where the writing dropped from a B to a B minus across the last three drafts."

4. At or under the word limit I gave. Not one word over. If you cannot fit both an accurate summary and a specific next step, cut the summary, not the next step.

5. Australian English throughout. Realise, colour, behaviour, analyse. No em-dashes and no en-dashes anywhere. Commas, full stops, parentheses, semicolons only. Regular hyphens in compound words are fine.

BANNED PHRASES. Do not use any of these in any comment, in any form.

- "consistently demonstrates"
- "always tries their best"
- "is a valuable member of the class"
- "shows a positive attitude"
- "has a strong foundation"
- "continues to develop"
- "is a joy to teach"
- "shows resilience"
- "has made pleasing progress" (unless my voice sample uses "pleasing", in which case fine)
- any adverb ladder: "clearly", "effectively", "thoroughly", "consistently", "actively"

If any of the following are true, STOP before writing and tell me.

- I have given you fewer than three specific pieces of evidence for a student. Ask for more before writing that student's comment. A comment with two bullets to draw on will be thin, and the parent will feel it.
- The evidence I gave contradicts the grade (for example a B+ grade with three bullets of missed deadlines and no submitted work). Ask me which is right before writing.
- The voice sample I pasted is itself the corporate-teacher voice you are banned from using. Tell me the sample will not carry my voice, and ask for a different one, or offer to write in a plainer default.

What it does well

Two moves do the real work. The voice sample plus the banned-phrase list together kill most of the AI tells that parents have started to notice this year. The evidence map plus the flag line make each comment auditable in about fifteen seconds: you scan the map, check the flag, and you know before you paste which sentences are grounded and which the model reached for.

Where it falls over

The comments are only as good as your evidence bullets. Three thin bullets ("participated well", "did the tasks", "improved a bit") will produce three thin comments, and the model will not tell you the bullets were thin unless you make it. It also cannot capture the things you would naturally weave in from knowing the room: a family bereavement, a slow start after moving school, a friendship group that shifted mid-semester. Those still belong to you. And do not skip the flag line to save time. That is the check that separates editing an AI draft from signing an AI draft, and one is fine and the other is not.

Try it like this

For Year 9 English, do half a class at a time. Feed your last set of drafts and the moderation notes as the evidence bullets, and the two comments you wrote in Semester 1 as the voice sample. You should recognise the second-semester comments as things you would have said.

For VCE, do one student at a time. Feed the SAC results, the two most recent pieces of coursework and the study-design outcome you are reporting against. The comment will hold together in a way a whole-class batch will not, because a VCE report has to survive appeals.

For a primary generalist reporting across five learning areas: run the prompt five times, once per area, with a different voice sample each time if your voice shifts between numeracy and the arts. If you only have five minutes today, do one student across one learning area, and use the shape of that comment as a template you edit for the others yourself.

Read every comment aloud before you paste. If it sounds like you at parent-teacher interviews, it will read like you on the report. If it sounds like a stranger, the model chose the voice, and you have not finished the job yet.