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

We are considering making two changes to the review framework and would like to know your thoughts before we decide whether or not to make these changes. You can see an example of a review framework below.

Change 1
Get rid of the star ratings. This would leave the comment boxes as the only feedback mechanism. I like the stars because they provide additional feedback. Others hate the stars because they seem so arbitrary. Do you think we should keep, remove, or make the star ratings optional? Is there something you think we should replace the star rating system with?

Change 2
Provide a “not applicable” checkbox to allow reviewers to skip a section of the critique framework. For example, if a story doesn’t have dialogue the reviewer would not be forced make up feedback for the dialog section. Should we continue to require everything to be filled out in the review framework or should we provide a way to skip sections?

Sample Review Framework

Thanks for your help,

Jacob