1. Before you start – pick your reviewers carefully

For a start, you don’t want too much feedback, so I think it’s a good idea to limit your number of critics to 5 well thought out selections. Be careful, and honest with yourself about your choice. You want people who:

• will be honest with you and not just say nice things
• Can communicate what they think about your writing
• Read often

You might also want people who are familiar with the genre you are writing in, but that might depend on what your aims are for the piece.

2. Don’t argue.

There will be a temptation to defend your writing when receiving criticism. This is fair enough, but as soon as you start arguing your case, you’ve closed the doors. Instead, force yourself to be quiet when receiving criticism. Don’t reply, other than to thank them (this includes replying in writing). Not arguing forces you to carefully consider what has been said. That does not mean you have to agree. As long as you have taken it in, if you still don’t agree, that’s fine.

3. Weigh up the responses.

You have to decide how much a particular criticism is worth and whether you will take it on. Again, be honest; it can be very easy to find reasons to dismiss all criticism. But if you’ve selected your critics carefully it’s almost certainly not the best option.

Having said that, there may be perfectly good reasons to give greater weight to some people’s comments over others. One person, unfamiliar with the genre, could find one passage confusing, whereas an aficionado in that genre might sail through it without comment or give it particular praise. Now, depending on how accessible you want the piece to be, you could change it to suit one person or the other.

Also, numbers make a difference. A comment that comes up more than once within a group of five people, certainly warrants your attention.

4. Let them know what you expect.

If you are after something specific, tell them. If you want them to just give general comments, tell them that. Give them the list of tips for giving feedback from this website if you like especially if they are not used to giving feedback.

Making sure they know what you are expecting adds value to the comments you get. Otherwise you risk getting something back that you can’t use.

5. Remember, it’s your writing.

You can’t please all the people all the time. There will come a time (numerous times, in fact) when, having considered the comments made against your writing, you simply can’t change it. You just don’t agree with the point being made. And anyway, you know that later in the story, this and this will happen, clearing up the confusion in that exchange and explaining just why the banana ended up there in the first place.

So, you make an executive decision, and you don’t change it. Or you change it in another way entirely. The point is, never relinquish control. This is your piece, and in the end, it’s down to you, and not them.

That’s your lot! I hope that is of some use. But if not, let me know what tips you would give. I welcome any feedback in the comments. Come on, I can take it

So with that in mind, I’ve been thinking about what I do when I give feedback, and also the kind of feedback I like to receive on my writing. And here’s the result – my six tips for reviewing someone else’s work and giving feedback.

Six? Six? That’s not catchy at all is it? Well it was going to be five until I realised I had left out a very obvious, but no less important one. Besides, I’m not going to hamstring a perfectly good list by forcing it to fit a title; that’s not how I roll!

1. Be constructive

This is number one because I want to get it out if the way – it is SO obvious, and should go without saying, but in the interests of completeness…

Don’t just say that something is rubbish. Don’t just say that something is great. If you like/dislike something, tell them why that is. There. Done.

2. Be honest

Another obvious one, but it can be very easy to go all coy and give only praise. Praise is a great ego massage, but there’s only so much you can do with it. If a writer has given you something to look at, it should be because they want to improve it, not because they are showing off. So point them in the right direction!

3. Keep it broad brushstrokes, and don’t write it for them

If I’m asked to give feedback, I will generally keep that feedback broad. I will talk about pacing, characterisation, how I felt about a piece overall. Unless I’ve been asked, I wouldn’t want to pick on a particular paragraph and try to dissect it (apart from to say it was too long, for example – again, quite a broad point to make).

I am not editing the piece, so it would do no good to tell them to cut sentences, or write in more appropriate words. I don’t want to impinge on the writer’s voice, or the direction they are going to take their story. There are times when I think I would have written a sentence differently, but a lot of the time, that comes down to personal taste or style (again, there are exceptions – I would point out if I did not understand a particular sentence for example).

As an illustration, I might read a chapter from a longer piece and say something along the lines of,

“A lot if stuff happens in this chapter, and there are a few different concepts about how the world works that are introduced all at once. I wouldn’t mind a slower pace so that I can digest it all”

Or

“I’ve got a good handle on character A but I’m having trouble distinguishing between characters B C and D”

It’s then up to the author to decide if they agree and to work out a way of slowing the pace down or differentiating their characters.

5. Ask them what they’re looking for

A lot of times you might want to give comments about a piece if work. but the author is already aware of the issue or may even have written it that way on purpose. This is especially true if you are reviewing part of a longer piece of writing. For example, it is not hard to imagine reading a detailed description of a character and commenting, “I don’t think we need to spend so much time over such an insignificant character”. The author might know different, and might prefer to know whether that description was vivid enough that you would recognise the character several chapters later, when they suddenly become vital.

So, with this in mind you can ask the author if there are any specific things they’d like you to look for.

6. Ignore what authors ask you to look for

Okay, so I deliberately phrased that point like that to mess with you! But seriously, even if I’ve asked for something I should look for, I will then ignore that when I read through the text. I will then read the questions afterwards.

The idea behind this is that I want to be able to give an honest answer, untainted by bias because I’ve been primed. After all, the reader is not going to have a list of prompts to indicate how they should read the text. Having read the questions, I may go back and re read parts or all of the text, but this is largely to help decide why I felt the way I did about it. Say I completely missed the description of that character above. I would want to be able to tell the author why I thought that was, and offer any tips I could.

So those are my tips. There’s probably a great many more things you can usefully keep in mind when looking at writing, but these are the points that I tend to concentrate on. If you have any tips, please share them in the comments.