So, Here’s What I Think: Giving/Receiving Criticism

 

When I was in college, I was recruited by one of my professors to apply to NIU’s Writing Center to be someone that other students could come to and receive help with school papers they were working on. The position had a title like consultant or something, but I can’t remember the verbiage. I think I took a credited course through one of the other instructors at the Writing Center that was an in-depth look at writing form and criticism, and before long, I was meeting with other students, and they were reading their work to me while I made notes on a copy before me.

Now, these were college students, and many of them wanted me to wave a magic wand and fix all the issues (namely grammar) in their papers. First, I didn’t have said wand, and two, that wasn’t the Writing Center’s goal. If the student committed some grammar miscue multiple times, we were encouraged to point one out and tell them to review their work for other instances. My job was to guide them to being better writers in whatever curriculum they were writing toward. So, we talked about format, style, logic, consistency and occasionally that ugly “P” word that happens as often accidently as it does on purpose for new writers doing research projects.

The experience at the Writing Center opened my mind, and I took my school papers and some of my fiction work to get feedback. Now feedback is something I crave from people that read my stuff. Not just the “That’s good,” or “Wow, I liked that,” but actual constructive criticism. “Hey, you’re veering away from point here and here,” or “Your character is being inconsistent here.”

Most people are scared to give criticism, particularly in this era of waving away criticism by saying, “Oh, that’s just your opinion,” or “You just don’t understand.” But, if you’re going to be any kind of writer, you must check your ego at the workshop door and realize no one gets it completely right the first time, or even the second time, or the third time. If you want to get better, you’ll listen and take those ideas into revisions and into future projects.

I had a Sports Editor in my early days who arrived at SVM with his guns blazing when it came to reviewing stories. He’d call you up behind him as he tore through your articles, asking pointed questions sometimes about every sentence, if necessary. I remember his first night, one of our part timers wandered the building after one such session, throwing up his hands in frustration, before walking out and never coming back. During my time at SVM, I found that to be a common reaction from reporters who perhaps had went several years in the industry without ever working for an actual editor, an editor with high expectations for what was going to appear in his or her section. Most of them couldn’t handle it, so they left, either giving up the business or trying other papers where the need for coverage outweighed expectation of quality writing. The reality was that no one was getting rich covering prep sports, so recruiting talented writers to work late nights often on the road under deadline requirements was not an easy sell, and you sometimes had to settle for what you could get.

My style when I became Sports Editor wasn’t particularly effective, at least in hindsight I don’t feel that it was. I think I was often too gruff and my running commentary with my staff sometimes undermined my ability to nudge them to break certain habits in their writing, and I often dwelled on issues without offering techniques for improvement. We had achieved a level of success under previous administrations, and I mostly tried to maintain that rather than aggressively cultivating even better writing from my existing staff.

As I move away from journalism and into the world of providing thoughts on fiction and other works by the members of my writing group, I try to gravitate back toward the things I learned both at the Writing Center some 20 years ago and some of the lessons I learned as an editor at SVM. Here are a few:

1. Always start with something positive. That opens the line of communication between you and the writer on a good note.
2. Criticism is always better received when a possible alternative is presented. Don’t just say, “I don’t like this,” go with “What if you were to do this instead?”
3. Keep the points to two or three. Maybe there are more issues but let them digest the most noticeable things after one reading. If they return, then you can hammer into other things.
4. Ask questions. Writers often discover issues when trying to answer questions.
5. Always listen to them. If you want them to listen to you, you must give the same courtesy to them.
6. Finish with another positive and encouragement. Writing is hard. Good writing can be like calculus. We all need someone cheering us on.