Nine guidelines for giving better feedback.

Not all feedback is created equal, and some barely deserves the name. If you’re in a position where your opinion matters, why not use that privilege to help and support your fellow writers? These nine guidelines for giving better feedback are a great place to begin.

Note: None of this applies to reviews. Reader reviews are a separate entity and need not be tampered with in any way on our part. Reviews are not feedback.

It took me a while. I made plenty of mistakes, but I’m in a place now where oodles of awesome people are trusting me with their gorgeous stories. Don’t believe me? I’ve got witnesses. And all it takes is placing a few common-sense rules and tools in your feedback toolkit.

Without further ado, here are nine guidelines for giving better feedback.

Before starting:

You won’t get far if you don’t think your actions through. We can all get caught up in the moment and forget to question our actions, so here’s a simple checklist you need to answer before you ever give any feedback at all:

1. Is my feedback solicited? – There are few things more harmful to a partnership than unwelcome opinions, no matter how valid they are. There are a hundred reasons why someone might not be looking for feedback at a certain stage – early drafts, confidence issues, already published, etc – and it’s your job to respect that. And no, couching it as a “Personally, if I were you, I wouldn’t…” opinion doesn’t fool anyone.
2. Do I understand the context? – What stage of editing is the project in, and has it already had feedback? Is it complete and published or an unedited sneak peek? Is the story based on true events? Does it count as an #OwnVoices story? What is the intended target group? Is it intended for self-publishing or query? All these make subtle differences in how we give feedback.
3. Am I in an emotionally stable place? – Whether you like it or not, your mood and emotions will impact how you read stories and how you critique them. Don’t let the fact that you’ve had a horrible week and are nursing a migraine make you scathe the living daylights out of some poor soul for whom that critique might mean the world.

While reading:

Sometimes the most well-intended beta-readers might not know what to say. That’s not a problem! Even if you have no experience giving feedback, your voice is valuable. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, here are the most helpful things you can mark up while reading:

1. This made me laugh/made me happy/scared me/gripped me. The single most useful thing you can do is highlight a paragraph, sentence, or word and say “This works for me.” It doesn’t matter if you don’t know why. It doesn’t matter if you can’t explain it. Often, people think critique is all about the bad – but if we don’t know what the good parts are, how do we know to keep them in?

2. This confused me/is hard to read/lost me/doesn’t make sense/doesn’t add up with…/feels forced. We need to know when something doesn’t work in order to improve. Be very careful not to fall into the “You should…” talk. Unless you’re an editor, it is not your place to be prescriptive. Limit your feedback to how you felt, and allow the author to fix the problem by themselves, or ask you for more details.
3. This tripped me up – Highlight anything that makes you double-take, whether it’s odd punctuation, a word that the author uses way too often (I’m looking at you, “just”), or strange verb tenses. While it isn’t the primary job of critique to pick out spelling or phrasing errors, if you do happen to see them there’s no harm in pointing them out. Be very careful to limit these suggestions to things you are sure of and can explain. The fact that you would write it differently is not the same as “there’s an error”.

When it’s show and tell time:

It’s easy to fumble the touchdown. Presenting feedback is the most collaborative part of the process, and “drop the link and run” is not the way to go.

1. Start with what you loved. No, this isn’t the compliment sandwich. The purpose of this isn’t to make the author feel good. The purpose is to establish that you are the right person to give feedback on this story. Show the author that you paid attention and got something meaningful out of their work. It is your job to establish that before the author has any reason to trust your opinion. If I haven’t shown you that I *got* you, your message, and your goals, then I have no business telling you what to do.
2. Under no circumstances can you give generalized criticism. “Your dialogue is shoddy”, “Your prose is clunky”, “You’re not funny”, etc are permission slips to immediately dismiss the entire body of feedback. When there’s a problem in the text, you highlight the specific spot and express that it didn’t work and why. If your feedback isn’t actionable, it’s worthless, and an abuse of trust. If you don’t know how to/don’t want to do the work, you shouldn’t be in a position to give feedback.

3. Stick around. Make it clear that you are available to discuss any of the points you brought up, and be prepared to explain what you mean by them. When dealing with new critique relationships, you might not have the same vocabulary or understanding of what works and what doesn’t. A hearty chat about what went on in the comments is often the most fun part of any critique relationship, and without it your opinions don’t have much value.

Final thoughts:

Now that you know how it works, why not take your new-sound feedback skills and sign up for Scribophile? It’s a great place to practice, and by the time you’re ready to post your own work and receive critique, I’ll have an article out on how to handle that.

As for what some people call critique, but absolutely isn’t – hopefully, these nine guidelines for giving better feedback will help you avoid falling into any of these swirly pits of critique doom. We’ve already touched on this a little, but here’s a bonus round of “this is absolutely not valid feedback in any way”:

1. This was great. Loved it. Bye!
2. Your writing sucks. Your characters are boring.
3. I don’t like this genre.
4. I didn’t understand the story.
5. Horror is for weirdos.
6. Have you tried writing erotica?
7. No, really, I heard they make more money…
8. Put the knife down!
9. Aaaaaaaargh!

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Bonus tip: If you want to go above and beyond, check out my “Nine Quick Tips for Self-editing” and apply them to the text you’re critiquing. Be sure to always check with the author first, as some of those are more in-depth than you’d normally go for feedback.