Building Up Authors vs. Tearing Down Writing
Last week I was explaining Review Fuse to a friend. At the end of our conversation she asked me what made Review Fuse different. I replied “there are a lot of online writing groups that praise everyone’s work as literary genius. Review Fuse is different because our mission is to get members to tell each other how to improve their writing.”
I felt pretty good about my mission statement until spoke with a creative writing professor after demonstrating Review Fuse in one of his creative writing courses. While the students were busy critiquing each other’s essays I asked the professor how he helped students improve as authors. His reply made me question my mission statement. He said “there are enough people out there to tear you down. I build my students up by focusing on telling them what they do well. When my students try to publish their writing they will find out how good and determined they really are.”
In order to understand what you really expect from a critique I reviewed some of the critiques given on Review Fuse this weekend. I found that
- Critiques that told the authors what they did well and pointed out how to improve received great feedback scores.
- Critiques that only pointed out how to improve generally received average critique feedback scores.
- Critiques that simply praised the literary genius of the author tended to receive low feedback scores.
My new critique mission statement includes both building up and pointing out how to improve. What do you expect from the critiques you receive?
Jacob
Stumble it!
March 2nd, 2009 at 7:25 am
A good (really good) review is one that point out both flaws and strenghts. Personally, I need to have my own mistakes thrown into my face, so I can see where I did wrong and what I need to work on more. But then again, I also need to be shown the good parts, for otherwise I would not distinguish those parts as being good and I would not know to use them again in future writings.
But since by default anyone’s tendency is to believe their work is good (this Is the first tendency, after one finishes writing a piece in a more or less draft version, one’s kind’a attached to it like to a child and can not think it bad), I incline to appreciate a little more reviews that point out the mistakes. Say… 55% tearing down and 45% building up
May 14th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Tearing down is okay if you do it with kindness and support, not nastiness - otherwise it’s not useful at all.