How do you balance constructive criticism and the honesty required to give a helpful critique?

I try to always start by telling the author something I liked about their piece. Even when it is horrific, I can generally find at least one good character name or other trivial point to give a positive comment about.

After I have stated at least one positive thing I let the critique flow. A writer can’t improve unless they know their weak spots. Don’t waste time giving a fluffy feel good critique, tell the author what stinks so they can sweeten it up.

In graduate school the professors always said to end a critique on a positive note, but I generally forget to do this and thus far no one seems to care.

How do you balance constructive criticism and the honesty required to give a helpful critique?

Jacob

Critiquing can evoke the dark side of a reviewer. Some misled reviewers use these dark and loathsome feelings instead of logic, wisdom, and common sense to guide their critiques. These unfortunate souls have not yet learned the valuable lesson Kurt Vonnegut taught when he said “any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a story is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”

When you are critiquing don’t waste your time mutilating the sundae. Spend your time telling the author how to improve it; after all, a good critique provides specific ideas about how to improve. Praising or degrading without thorough explanation is a complete waste of your time and the author’s. As writers shouldn’t we be able to constructively present creative ways to help each other improve our works?

Do you enjoy eating a nice chocolaty sundae? If so please join our writing group and satisfy that lingering hunger for help.

Jacob

James Surowiecki is a staff writer at The New Yorker who made an amazing, yet obvious, discovery. Surowiecki discovered that by aggregating information from groups, the resulting decisions are often better than decisions made by any single member of the group or even those made by an expert.* In an anecdote supporting this discovery, Surowiecki related Francis Galton’s experience with this concept at a county fair. The county fair featured a contest in which individuals were challenged to accurately guess the weight of an ox. Galton was shocked to discover that when the guesses of all of the individual participants were averaged, the resulting number was closer to the ox’s true weight than the estimates of most of the individual participants or cattle experts. In other words, we can learn from Galton that lots of people are generally smarter than one person.

Galton’s experience illustrates the power of aggregating individual opinions and sources of information to develop an insightful, accurate analysis of a situation. ReviewFuse seeks to harnesses the power of crowds identified in Galton’s story to overcome the frustration writers often experience in getting honest, quality feedback about their work from peers and experts. To alleviate this frustration, ReviewFuse puts this power into your hands by connecting you with a network of people who can provide diverse, independent, and specialized opinions about your work.

When you submit your work to ReviewFuse, it will be reviewed by a group of your peers who will use a structured framework to analyze your work. This framework will explore the development of your characters, the plot and setting of your story, the use of first, second, or third person, and the use of proper grammar throughout your work. Additionally, reviewers can add comments in-line with your story to point out examples of things they liked about your work, along with examples of items they think could be improved. For more about this structured framework, in-line commenting, or additional reviewing features ReviewFuse has to offer, visit our How it Works page.

After receiving the reviews of your work, you should plan on spending some time to aggregate and synthesize your reviews to find common patterns and themes from your group of reviewers about how to improve your work. The feedback you receive from this community of your peers will likely be more valuable than any advice an expert could give you about how to improve your work—but you don’t have to take our word for it—give ReviewFuse a chance and see for yourself!

Jacob

* If you would like to know more about “The Wisdom of Crowds” check out James Surowiecki’s book.

Judging someone’s work can be a daunting task, especially when you find it needing a lot of work. Who are you to be telling them how they should have written their story? Well it turns out you are the expert and writers desperately crave your feedback and opinions.

Many reviewers forget that they have been given the title of expert and belittle their own thoughts and opinions just in case they are wrong.

• “The comma in the previous sentence is in the wrong spot, I think”
• “I believe it would be better to use a pronoun here instead of repeating the name so many times”
• “I would think you might want to shorten these paragraphs”

If you don’t know for sure that the comma is in the wrong spot say what you do know instead. Are you right? Absolutely, you know exactly what effect it had on you and the writer would love to know it.

• “The comma in the previous sentence made it difficult for me to read by breaking the rhythm I had established”
• “Repeating the characters name so many times made the paragraph feel very repetitious. Using pronouns would have helped the flow.”
• “The long paragraphs made the story feel like it was dragging on. Paragraph breaks would help to liven up the action and give my eyes a break as I read.”

Both sets of comments say about the same thing, one set just sounds like it came from an expert. Writers aren’t necessarily looking for a grammar expert, plot expert, or a voice expert. Most of the time they simply want to know what the story did for you. Let’s face it, Writers are very creative and stubborn people; if they don’t like what you said, they will just ignore it :-d. They don’t want you to be right, they just want you to be yourself “The Expert.”

Need some practice? Critique this post, I am sure it could be better.

steve