Comment Bank Generator

About this tool

Writing report-card comments is the quiet grunt work of teaching. A single class of twenty-eight students, two or three sentences per subject per quarter, is hundreds of small compositions — most of which want to say the same handful of things in slightly different words for slightly different students. This tool is the digital version of the comment bank teachers have quietly kept in a Google Doc for a decade: a curated set of phrases, organized by theme (effort, behavior, participation, progress, areas for growth) and tone (strong, satisfactory, needs work), that merge with a student's name and pronouns on the fly.

Pick a student. Pick a theme and tone. Click phrases to build a comment. Copy or print. That's the whole loop.

Everything runs in the browser. No accounts, no AI calls, no telemetry — the roster you paste, the comments you write, and the students' names never leave your device.

How to use it

1. Type a student name and pick pronouns (she/her, he/him, they/them, or name-only). Or paste a roster and step through the class — Load sample fills in an example roster if you want to try it before typing your own.
2. Choose a theme — Effort, Behavior, Participation, Progress, or Areas for growth — and a tone — Strong, Satisfactory, or Needs work.
3. The phrase list below shows curated sentences merged with the student's name and pronouns. Click any phrase to append it to the composed comment.
4. Mix and match across themes: a comment that only speaks to effort feels one-note. Two or three phrases across different themes reads like an observation of a whole student.
5. Edit the composed comment freely — the textarea is fully editable. Copy it into your gradebook or LMS, or print a copy to review.
6. To move to the next student on the roster, click Next student →. Each student's composed comment is remembered separately so you can walk back and edit.

Why a hand-written bank, not AI

Two reasons this is a text-merge tool and deliberately not an AI wrapper.

First, privacy. A student's name and behavioral profile is exactly the kind of data that shouldn't be sent to a large-language-model vendor you have no contract with. Even the LLM providers that promise not to train on inputs still store them, log them, and pass them through third-party infrastructure the teacher never sees. The classroom-tools industry has developed an unfortunate habit of quietly sending student data to APIs in service of a UX flourish — this tool doesn't do that. Nothing you type here goes anywhere.

Second, quality. AI-generated report-card comments drift toward interchangeable, hedged prose — the kind of language that reads well one time and formulaic by the fifth. A curated phrase bank keeps the writing specific and grounded in real classroom observations. The comments you write for one student should sound different from the comments you write for another; a hand-picked list of phrases you already agree with gets there faster than editing away the shape of an LLM output.

The trade-off: this bank has a fixed number of phrases. Combine several across themes for variety, edit freely once the phrase is dropped in, and treat the bank as a starting scaffold rather than a finished comment.

What pronoun merging actually handles

The phrases use tokens: {name}, {they}, {them}, {their}, {theirs}, and {themself}, plus verb-agreement tokens {is}, {has}, {does}, and {was}. Those cover almost every case you'll hit.

• For she/her or he/him: pronouns substitute as expected, verbs stay singular (she is, he has).
• For they/them: pronouns substitute as themselves, and verbs shift to their plural form (they are, they have, they do, they were). Verb agreement is the part that trips up templated writing most often — this tool handles it automatically, so a phrase reads correctly whichever pronoun you pick.
• Name-only mode replaces pronouns with the student's name where a subject or object is needed; possessives become [Name]'s. It's a fallback for when you'd rather write comments without pronouns entirely. Some phrasings read slightly stilted in name-only mode; those cases are still fine to edit after the fact.

Sentences also start with capitalized pronouns where needed — the tool capitalizes the first letter of a substituted pronoun when it opens a sentence.

Writing comments that actually help

A few conventions that make report-card comments land better with families:

• Lead with a specific observation, then generalize. "Priya volunteered a strong revision of the group's thesis on Wednesday" beats "Priya is a good group member." The bank leans specific; edit in even more specificity when you can.
• Balance dimensions. A comment that is only "effort, effort, effort" tells a family the student is trying, but nothing about what they're learning. Aim for one phrase from a content/progress theme and one from a behavior or effort theme.
• Match the tone to the evidence. The three tone bands aren't a grade — they describe the language register. "Strong" phrases celebrate; "satisfactory" phrases affirm the baseline; "needs work" phrases raise concerns without exaggerating them. Pick the band that matches what the student actually did this term.
• When raising a concern, pair it with a path. An "areas for growth" phrase reads better next to an actionable next step — practicing a skill, sitting closer to the front, coming to office hours. The bank includes several path-oriented phrasings; use them.
• Keep it short. Two to four sentences per subject is plenty. Families skim; a wall of prose signals a form letter even when it isn't.

Frequently asked questions