We recently made a significant change to the way we assign reviews. Previously, we never assigned a member to review the same work twice. However, after several authors dramatically changed their stories to incorporate review feedback, we decided to allow authors to review the same story if it had been edited. Was this a good or bad idea? Please share your thoughts.

When you are critiquing someone’s writing please remember the following guidelines.

1. Start the critique by telling the author what they did right, and then follow up by telling the author what they did wrong in their writing.
2. Critique the writing. When recommending ways to improve another’s work say “The story should…” or “This writing is…”
3. Do not critique the writer. Never say, “You are…” or “You should…”
4. Give a fair and useful critique even if you don’t like the topic.
5. Never say anything remotely close to “This is awful”, “That is stupid”, or “You’re an awful writer.”

Would you like a chance to sharpen your critiquing skills? If so, then join Review Fuse or enter our free Holiday writing contest.

Jacob

Last week Steve announced our new public and private writing groups. We wrote about this exciting feature right before the Thanksgiving Holiday. A lot of our members did not have a chance to read about this powerful new feature so I wanted to quickly recap.

• Private Writing Groups
  • Invite your friends, family, colleagues, and current writing group members to join.
  • Receive critiques from those you trust.
  • Save time and gas by meeting online.
• Public Writing Groups
  • Focus on specific genres or topics.
  • Group creator can remove users who do not contribute to the group.
  • Improve your writing by getting help from your peers.

If you would like to try our public and private groups please join our writing community.

Jacob

I know a lot of aspiring authors who think writing is easy. They dabble in writing under the illusion that they can write a great work anytime they choose to. This attitude will forever condemn them to the ranks of the aspiring.

Fortunately we seem to have writers with more fortitude than that at Review Fuse. I reviewed a first chapter today that exemplifies how an author should write:

Books aren’t written — they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it. — Michael Crichton

The story I reviewed was titled The Distance of the Heart by peacemusictwloha13. This young author has rewritten this chapter several times and submitted it for review at least 3 times. This chapter has transformed from a fairly dull story about a day in the life of a teen to an engaging chapter that leaves the reader wanting for more. If you look over the various reviews of and revisions to this story you will be able to see how she transformed this work by rewriting it several times.

If you would like some help finding the fortitude to keep rewriting your works please join the Review Fuse online writing community.

Jacob

We are pleased to announce the beta version of private writing groups. You can now create or join writing groups to share your work with a subset of the Review Fuse Community that is focused on a specific topic. You can also move your face-to-face writing groups online for those weeks you just can’t find the time to get together.  You can create groups that are publicly accessible or private groups that require an invitation and a password to join.  All groups also have the option for the moderator to approve all members who wish to join. You will be able to make sure the group remains true to what you need it to be.

We appreciate all the suggestions we received on how to implement the writing groups and welcome any additional feedback while using this new feature.   Our goal for these writing groups is to help you:

• Receive quality reviews from peers you trust
• Learn how to critique work by following our guided reviews
• Save time and Gas by moving your personal writing groups online
• Mostly importantly, to improve your writing with the feedback and help of your peers

Join Review Fuse to take advantage of our new writing groups and to help us improve services available to writers.

I am excited to announce a feature that a number of you have asked for. A summarized printable view of the reviews you have received, click on the image to see an example. We appreciate all of your suggestions for this feature that we did not think of on our own. Without your input we might not have created this feature which has proved so useful to Review Fuse authors. If you have not yet, signup to receive peer critiques like this one.

Private writing groups is getting really close to being released as well. There are a few tricky things to work out with it, but we are well on our way and excited for this too. I will let everyone know when it is released. Thank you all again for the suggestions on what we can improve. Please continue to let us know what you need, we will definitely do our best to get it for you.

Steve

Recently we have had questions and comments about our clean content policy that I would like to address. Please note that this policy is only enforced in the general Review Fuse community. Private groups are allowed to form and enforce their own content polices. Review Fuse does prohibit pornographic and illegal material in public and private groups.

When we started working on Review Fuse we had to make a decision of what material we wanted to allow to appear on our website. Some choices were cut and dry, such as the following statement from our terms and conditions that prohibits anything that is “unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, pornographic, libelous, invasive of another’s privacy, or harms minors in any way; that harasses, degrades, intimidates or is hateful toward an individual or group of individuals on the basis of religion, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, age, or disability.”

Other decisions, such as what is considered inappropriate language, were much more difficult to decide on. The overall deciding factor was that we wanted people age 13 and up to be comfortable using our site. In accordance, each member is given the right to filter out profanity when they are reading the story. This will replace profane words with replacement strings such as “*****”. While we do not wish to censor the work of our members, we do however, have to make sure we censor what appears on Review Fuse so our members will feel comfortable using the site.

Also, with that in mind, we adopted a clean content policy that we compare to PG-13 rating for movies. This is an overall guiding principle in that we do not provide a list of aspects that may or may not appear in the submitted work. The decision of whether or not a community flagged work is appropriate is left to the sole discretion of Review Fuse and it’s employees.

Do you have any questions about our clean content policy? What are your thoughts on letting the member choose to review/read an edited version of your work?

steve

We have read your suggestions from your emails and your comments to our blog post and have decided to allow the creation of personal writing groups. We are quite excited about this feature which will allow everyone to get exactly what they are looking for from a writing group. This will also allow writing groups, for whom it is hard to meet regularly, to move online for those weeks they can’t seem to get their schedules to match.

Just as we asked for your suggestions on what features to work on, we would also like your help on making sure we implement those features correctly. We have put together the following list of important aspects of personal writing groups.

• Groups may be public or private. Private groups will require a password to join and will not be visible on the list of writing groups. Public groups will have the option to allow all to join or to require each member to be approved by the group owner. The group owner will be able to remove members at anytime.
• When you submit an item for review, you will be able to choose where to submit the item. If you choose to submit to a personal writing group, then all your review assignments will come from work in that group and all your reviews will come from that group as well.
• The group owner can specify how many review assignments are required. For example, a group owner may say that for every submission the member will do and receive 1 review.
• Group owners are allowed to specify a title and description that will be visible to our members looking for writing groups to join.

Please let us know what you think about these features and if you have any additional ideas of things that would be important for you.

steve

Our site for facilitating peer-to-peer reviews recently got a review of it’s own in The 2009 Internet Directory: Web 2.0 Edition.

This book was co-authored by our good friend Mikal Belicove, who is a freelance writer, ghost blogger, and corporate communications and business management consultant. Mikal has the envious job of not only getting to work from home, but also getting to sit at a desk in front of a window with a great view of the ocean.

Back in June, I was in Laguna Beach visiting Mikal, and I told him about Review Fuse and showed him some early mockups and concepts of the site. He loved the idea and said it was just the type of site that should be included in his new book–which he just happened to be sending to his publisher that weekend. After peppering me with several questions, he wrote up a new entry for Review Fuse.

Check out our review as well as all the other great sites that were hand-picked and reviewed by Mikal and his co-authors in The 2009 Internet Directory: Web 2.0 Edition available now at Amazon.com.

Mikal and I at the beach near his house. Probably talking about Review Fuse

Clark

After you have received a peer review, please take one or two minutes to rate it. Rating the reviews you receive provides valuable feedback to your reviewers, which helps them learn how to improve their future reviews. The feedback about reviews also provides important information to our system about which reviewers give great, average and poor reviews. Our peer matching software uses the feedback you provide to match you more closely with your peers.

To rate a review go to the “Read Reviews” tab of your story and click the “Rate or Comment on this Review” link, as shown below. Once you’ve clicked on the link, you can use our short questionnaire, as shown in below, to provide feedback and comments about the review you received.

Rate or Comment on this Review

Short Questionnaire

Jacob