How to Give Writing Feedback that’s Constructive, Not Crushing

Critiques must be handled with a deft touch, somewhere between soft-pedaling and soul-crushing. This advice will help you give constructive feedback that will leave the writer excited to make improvements rather than looking for the nearest rock to crawl under.

As a managing editor, I’ve helped writers produce more readable content. I thought I had a knack for giving useful writing feedback. That is, until a writer friend asked for my thoughts on her novel-in-progress. I gave them, pointing out where her plot seemed to lag and the characters felt flat. Surely she would be grateful for my insight and go forth to make her book even better, wouldn’t she?

Not so much. In fact, she eventually confessed that my comments caused her to shut down and stop writing for months, convinced she was doomed to fail and that her writing career was over.

Most people have good intentions and don’t want to give blistering critiques. (Well, there are a few surly critics, but they’re not the audience for this article.) You’re here because you want to learn how to give good, straightforward feedback that won’t make the writer defensive or, worst of all, deflate his or her spirit. Here’s how to make that happen.

Remember that creatives may experience imposter syndrome

We’re fragile people, we creative types. And, ironically, the more talented we are, the more likely we are to think we’re complete frauds—wannabe hacks undeserving of success.In fact, some creatives rack up impressive achievements all while feeling certain that, at any moment, someone’s going to expose them as nothing but a poseur.

This psychological phenomenon is called impostor syndrome, and it strikes writers who produce anything from poetry to fiction to monthly marketing reports. It may well be what you’re up against when you start giving a writer honest feedback. Even if she’s not outwardly admitting it, the writer may feel like she has no business writing and should give up and make way for the real talents.

The first problem of any kind of even limited success is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that any moment now they will discover you.

—Neil Gaiman, author

Keep the writer’s psyche in mind when you’re preparing your feedback and make sure you acknowledge what they’ve done right as well as what needs improvement. Every piece of writing has some strengths, so look for them and be prepared to point them out.

Read the whole thing. Thoroughly.

Give the manuscript a thoughtful read-through (or two) before you give feedback. The writer is in a vulnerable position. He’s just handed you his baby and before you even hint that his newly minted child may not be attractive, you owe it to him to prove that you’ve invested more than a quick glance and offered a snap judgment.

Don’t skim. Read deeply. Take notes. If you can’t commit to this, don’t give feedback.

Forget about the compliment sandwich

You may have heard of the compliment sandwich, a technique for sandwiching criticism between praise. It’s often used by managers when giving their employees feedback, but it’s recognized by many professionals these days as ineffective. Think about it. Would this help soften a critical blow?

“I read most of your article and liked it, but your spelling awful and your grammar sucks. Are you sure you graduated high school? You did lay the manuscript out really well, though—good job!”

Instead, of sandwiching harsh criticism between empty positives, be honest. Don’t sugarcoat, but don’t trash the writing, either. “Diplomacy” is your watchword.

I’d hate to see spelling and grammar mistakes distract from a promising article. Have you tried using Grammarly as a second set of eyes to help with proofreading?

Ask questions that lead the writer in the right direction

The goal of a critique isn’t to show how much you know; it’s to help the writer expand on his potential. The best feedback leaves the writer feeling he’s had an awakening and knows what needs revision to make his writing work. Here’s an example:

Do you think there’s a way to simplify this paragraph? Shorter sentences could do the trick. What about reading it out loud to see where you can improve the flow?

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Don’t nitpick

Feedback is really about the quality of your suggestions, not the quantity. If the writer’s work needs proofreading, suggest a thorough line edit rather than picking at every little grammar, spelling, and punctuation nit. If passive voice or weak language choices are a theme, recommend that the writer take a closer look at those things.

A mountain of feedback, no matter how constructive, can be overwhelming. Choose a few of the most important things the writer can do to improve the manuscript, then point out an example to help them understand what you’re referring to.

Too many “to be” verbs can take the energy out of your writing. Perhaps you could identify some and rewrite them. Here’s an example:

He was walking walked to the market to meet Mary.

It’s a critique, not a review

Don’t treat feedback the same as you would a review. In most cases, when someone asks you for feedback, you’re looking at a work-in-progress, not a finished product. Giving feedback is about finding ways to suggest improvements, not declaring the work flawed and walking away. Share your ideas and tips.

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When you critique writing, your job is to determine whether the writer accomplished what they set out to do, whether that goal was to tell a good story or to write a convincing sales pitch. Focus on what the writer can do to improve the next draft and you’ll help them create a winning manuscript.

7 Writing Tips That Will Help You at Work

Let’s get the bad news over with first: no matter how much you write, it will probably never become the kind of mindlessly automatic task for which you’re fully free to zone out.

In other words, writing steadily for an afternoon will never be as meditative as a long drive down an empty highway. You have to keep filling the progress bar yourself. Seated at the keyboard, every moment a writer spends mentally compiling a grocery list or critiquing the coffee shop’s playlist is a moment that zero writing is done. It’s difficult.

That said, the upsides are many. If you’re the type for whom writing is mandatory—you don’t feel normal if you’re not stringing words together in your mind—then this list is for you. Here, we appreciate not just the handy tips that guide us to write better, but the accompanying lessons that have enhanced our very lives.

1Know how to open and expand your case

Thoughtful prioritization is essential not just to writing well, but to many aspects of effective communication. A good storyteller’s entry point is deliberate. From there, you have to recognize the difference between a telling nuance and a meaningless detail; pruning your sentences accordingly leads to a tight, muscular draft.

But this proclivity to discard extraneous asides has applications beyond the realm of word economy, or writing altogether: knowing how to decide your point and establish it forcefully can help in all manner of real-life interactions.

Whether you’re trying to win over a hiring committee or vying for the attention of a harried doctor, being able to succinctly and understandably summarize complex matters is an invaluable skill.

2You can’t win ’em all, but you can up your odds

There’s no on switch for creativity. Some days, it may take just a few short hours for a thousand pristine words to come pouring out of your fingertips like they’ve been waiting for someone to open the spigot. But other days, dragging even a few hundred words out of your mind and onto the page can be a bruising struggle.

Seasoned writers sometimes look at this the way a veteran poker player thinks about luck. You’d be a fool to presume you can control such variance, but with diligence, you can situate yourself to reap the maximum benefit while surviving the attendant rough patches. As a writer, if you find peace with this, the other vicissitudes of life will be that much less tilting.

3Hone not just presence of mind, but also endurance

There are a million jobs where the first thing you do after showing up is put your brain in a drawer and forget everything until it’s time to clock out. For better and for worse, writing isn’t one of them.

Writers in dynamic environments like agile startups and fast-paced newsrooms have to quickly grow their capacity to stay engaged—you’re constantly processing new information, communicating your appraisal of it, refining your decisions and explaining why. Practicing doing all this with grace and spirit is by turns taxing and rewarding. Some even say it’s a bit like a game.

4Plumb new and multifarious opportunities to learn

As writers, some of the lessons we glean are subtle: we notice some prose that overworks a distracting adjective like zestful, and like a young Stephen King, vow to never touch such a silly word again. The world is full of instructive examples of how not to write, if we look carefully.

Other times, the key takeaways beat you over the head, like an editor who insists you recast every sentence you hand in that contains the passive voice, or the one who long ago decided the only good adverb is a deleted adverb.

Taking edits, particularly from brusque managers on deadline, can sting the ego in a way that makes helpful writerly pointers hard to internalize.

Developing the fortitude to respond to feedback with buoyancy—to keep asking questions and suggesting fixes rather than retreat inward like a wounded animal into a cave—is a life lesson unto itself. The ability to handle it will continue to serve you two jobs later, when another editor remarks “Sorry to make your life’s work out of these revisions,” and you can truthfully reply, “I’ve had worse.”

5Empathize with your audience—and everyone else

“Pity the poor reader,” a wise editor once said. As a writer, you’re constantly putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. That’s not just the case for fiction authors imagining gritty lives as pioneers and space pirates, either.

Good writers frequently ask themselves, “What’s my audience going to think as they read this? Is this part too long? Could this section be clearer?” Reapproaching one’s draft with fresh eyes means constantly considering a stranger’s perspective.

This is a worthy exercise not just for the sake of clear writing but also patience with the world around us. People who can seem strange and frustrating to deal with are more easily understood and forgiven when we’re practiced at considering their point of view.

6Take care of yourself as only a writer can

Because writing is an exhausting discipline, those who keep at it learn ways to look after themselves. For Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, a big factor is going to bed early. Murakami is also an advocate for running, as is Joyce Carol Oates. Heavy metal music is integral to the creative process, at least for King.

Plus, if you routinely write in a distracting environment like an office with an open floor plan, you’ve probably had to devise a few strategies for surmounting the ambient vexations and quieting the mind enough to, you know, get some work done.

The writerly muscle known as the brain is prone to spasms; any knowledge worker versed in basic care for such situations is bound to be happier for it.

7Know when you’re done

You start by pondering. Then, if things go well, you plan, write, edit, revise, and polish. Somewhere along the way, if you’re not mindful, you end up fiddling, reordering things in ways you’re not sure matter, tweaking tenses, debating the inclusion of a stray but endearing adjective, and generally failing the final, vital step of mashing Send.

At least, that’s how it goes until you’ve been through it a few times.

Getting writing done resembles packing for a camping trip. You want to be thoroughly prepared, but not overloaded—to trim unneeded bulk, but not at the expense of something you might need. (Wait, what am I forgetting?) At some point, you have to stop agonizing over your inventory and just go.

The result, once you get there, might even be worth writing about.

Top Student Writing Mistakes: The Real “Madness” in Higher Education

According to some estimates, March Madness costs companies up to $134 million in lost productivity — with employees streaming the tournament online, updating brackets, participating in office pools, and more.

Imagine if the United States cared as much about the quality of a school’s curriculum as we do about the caliber of its basketball team?

In keeping with the competitive spirit of the NCAA basketball championship, the Grammarly team created a “tournament” of our own. We reviewed articles from 16 student newspapers at colleges across the country to come up with our own “Final Four,” as determined by the most well-written student newspapers. Here they are:

• The Stanford Daily (Stanford University)
• Statesman (Utah State University)
• Dartmouth Review (Dartmouth College)
• The Prospector (University of Texas, El Paso)

Congratulations to these exceptional student newspapers for the quality writing!

Is quality of writing a predictor of inclusion in the actual Final Four tournament? Only time will tell. But in the meantime, here is an overview of some of the most common writing mistakes made by students using the Grammarly platform.

What types of writing mistakes did you make as a student?

Robots and English

There’s a harsh reality we need to face—a robotic, AI-driven Shakespeare is nowhere in sight. No robot will write verse that influences English the way Bard’s did anytime soon. You won’t find an AI spitting rhymes like Rakim or Nas, either.

But if your standards aren’t too high, there is some AI-constructed poetry you can read today. Take an AI that uses the recurrent neural network language model technique, feed it thousands of romantic novels to learn language from, give it a starting sentence and an ending sentence, instruct it to fill the gap between them, and you’ll get something like this:

this was the only way. it was the only way. it was her turn to blink. it was hard to tell. it was time to move on. he had to do it again. they all looked at each other. they all turned to look back. they both turned to face him. they both turned and walked away.

This AI, designed by Google, Stanford University, and the University of Massachusetts, isn’t supposed to be the world’s first artificial poet—it’s just a side effect. And the AI’s output isn’t even this good a lot of the time. But if you keep in mind that the AI generated all of the sentences except the first and last on its own, it’s impressive that they all make sense and have a common theme. Apps, AI, and robots are very far from understanding language in the same way we do, but the things they can do are amazing.

Parsey McParseface is an English language parser Google built and released earlier this year, along with the code for SyntaxNet, a framework for a syntactic parser. If you put a sentence into Parsey McParseface, it will analyze it, identify the parts of speech, and determine their functions. This isn’t the first parsing algorithm, but it might be the most accurate. According to Google, Parsey does its thing with a 94 percent accuracy rate.

We know that virtual assistants can recognize what we’re saying, most of the time. Good proofreading software can catch more than just spelling mistakes and can have a noticeable impact on a person’s writing. But do you think machines could ever read your lips? If you’ve ever tried it yourself, you’ll know how hard it is, and even people who know how to read lips are only successful half of the time. LipNet, a neural network architecture under development by Oxford University, can achieve up to 93.4 percent accuracy. This can be very helpful to people with hearing impairments, but it can also help all of us communicate with machines better. If for nothing else, than to be sure they understand when we tell them they should stop trying to write poetry.

Center or Centre–Which Is Right?

Do you speak British or American English? Depending on your answer, you may differ on which spellings you favor.

Center and centre have the same meaning. Center is the correct spelling in American English, but British English writers usually prefer centre. Notice that center (and centre) can be a noun, adjective, or a verb. Seeing the two words in real-life examples may help you to visualize how to use them.

First, here are some sentences with centre and center.

Examples

The young athlete played center position on the ball team.

The discussion at the educational conference will center on childhood obesity.

The new doctor was very proud the first day he worked at the medical center.

Center in American Publications

Here are some quotes from the Internet.

The man at the center of the corruption case that led to the arrest of a former Suffolk police chief is expected to be released from prison and have his conviction tossed out on Tuesday.

Long Island News 12

Serbia on Wednesday introduced a lockdown for migrants in their refugee center outside Belgrade after an alleged attack against a woman walking with her children.

US News & World Report

Centre in British Publications

If the Countess of Wessex had been asked to hit a ball for a royal photo opportunity, rain would have stopped play. Fortunately, Sophie wasn’t required to participate, . . . merely to admire the facilities at the National Sports Centre in Bisham Abbey, Buckinghamshire.

Daily Mail

The Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths centre (STEM) at Airbus in Stevenage is based around the company’s Mars rover exploration programme.

BBC News

Center and centre are both correct spellings of the same world. However, where you live influences which spelling is most acceptable. If you like to learn about the differences between American and British English, you will enjoy researching the spelling of realize and dreamed.