As writing instructors, the authors spend hours "talking back" to their students through written comments on their drafts. But how do student writers receive their comments, and what do they "do" with this feedback? Teachers invest so much time and energy in their responses to papers. How do they know what gets through, what makes sense to their students? These questions certainly aren't new. Composition scholars have probed all kinds of interesting issues within the murky waters of teacher comments. However, the impetus for their own research surfaced when Nancy Sommers shared the results of a four-year longitudinal study of Harvard student writers. One of the most compelling conclusions Sommers reached in her study was that "feedback, more than any other form of instruction, shapes the way a student learns to write." This article describes a pilot study on developmental writers' attitudes toward and use of instructor-written feedback in multiple sections of a precollege-level writing course at the authors' college. (Contains 2 figures and 1 note.)