When you are reviewing, what is your authority level? Do you enforce a checklist? Are you merely asked to give your professional opinion? Are you a senior super

When you are reviewing, what is your authority level? Do you enforce a checklist? Are you merely asked to give your professional opinion? Are you a senior supervising a junior? These are critical inputs for me to calculate tone. When I've done reviews, I had some seniority and an organizational privilege to veto some code. I worked from a checklist and a goal (with which the checklist was meant to align, but we knew it was not possible to fully automate those aspects of review). These are my takeaways from that arrangement: Language like "declined" or "REJECTED" or "can't approve" is discouraging to the individual contributor. I replaced all that with discussion of why I can't allow that, under the obvious subtext of rejection. No need to just rub it in when there is learning to offer. When indicating required changes, especially where I was more-or-less handing them the replacement code, I always said please. Always. Most importantly, I gave accurate feedback. I took the time to be sure I was right before I wrote a review. Otherwise what's the point. Even simple patches got tested.