A really good friend showed me a personal essay and asked for my honest opinion. She was looking to enter a contest, so I wanted to give her some good feedback to make her writing stand out.
But as it turned out, this was her final draft, and she was really just looking for affirmation that she’s a good writer.
The essay needed a lot of work. But when I gave my friend a list of the things that needed to be fixed, she got so upset that she deleted the draft and didn’t enter the contest at all. Now I feel terrible.
What should I have done differently? How do you gently break the news to someone that theor writing needs a lot of work?
I do think I was too harsh. But I also didn’t want her to enter the contest without having a stellar piece.
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If you can’t give constructive criticism, maybe don’t say anything?
Sorry, I posted this too soon, and didn’t provide any context. I’ve edited (as in – completely rewritten) my post to provide more details.
Okay, now with more context, I can say that it seems like you did things properly after all. At least, I hope you told her what needed work and how to potentially improve it.
So it seems that your friend is just one of those people who can’t handle any criticism. You could try apologizing to her, and explaining that you wanted to help her and admit that you might have been a bit too harsh, but that it was in order to push her to be a better writer.
In hindsight, I was too harsh. I was so focused on helping her improve that I forgot to say anything positive.
But that’s a good point about stating my genuine intentions to help. I think I tend to be overly critical as part of my personality, and it doesn’t really come across that I have good intentions.
Some people have not learned how to accept criticism, constructive or otherwise, and that is a skill just as important as the writing itself. I was guilty of this for years as was my wife who is a visual artist. Once you regularly have your work scrutinized and you learn how to filter criticism and use it to improve your work, it becomes one of if not the most-important part of the creative process.
Best advice I can give for handling this particular situation is to encourage the person to keep writing and to start asking for critique earlier in the process, to be vocal about if they feel the criticism is unfair, and to try as hard as possible to suspend the feeling that “critique = they think I’m a bad writer.” Ensure them that anything you suggest is given with the purest intent, not meant to hurt the author but to improve the piece.
We are emotional beings and we put a lot of heart and soul into what we make and it’s understandable that our gut reaction to even constructive criticism is wounded pride. It never goes away completely, but if you want to be successful, you need to get comfortable with hearing objective opinions about your work.
I’ve always been very critical with both myself and others. I, personally, don’t like it when people give me all positive feedback and no negative because I don’t get any valuable ideas about how to improve.
To me, launching into a laundry list of negatives feels natural. But I’m starting to wonder whether most people might not feel the same. I’ll have to try to be more sensitive in the future.
I can say personally I have gotten feedback on an essay I thought was really well done and it felt terrible, even if the feedback was put in the best way possible.
If you’re dealing with someone like this, probably be very careful and give pointers one at a time (I like the beginning paragraph, though it raises the bar so the next paragraph seems weaker in comparison. How would you feel about changing abc to xyz?)
The problem with giving a lot of suggestions at once, especially if they’re good suggestions, is it can make the person feel like “wow these are obvious and I should’ve done this already, how did I write such a flawed essay?” essentially you’re trying to prevent the demoralization by taking them step by step to success, rather than shoving the mistakes in their face (even if well intentioned)
You know, that’s exactly what I did – a whole truckload of suggestions at once.
I have a very critical eye when it comes to editing, and I was eager to help. (Also, I forgot to say anything positive about her writing.) I think it came across as an attack against her writing.
Next time, I’ll remember to give the critiques one at a time. Thanks for the feedback.
