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Praise vs. Encouragement



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Sun Dec 03, 2006 6:05 am
Snoink says...



Okay... as many of you know, I went to this tutoring seminar and I got this wonderful wealth of information. One of the topics that was discussed was the difference between praise and encouragement. You see, praise was discouraged. At first, that whole concept was like "WTF?" to me. I mean, I always thought praise was supposed to be good. But they made sure to explain it.

Praise would be complimenting the person. So if you said, "Wow, Snoink, you're the best!" you would be praising me. And this is bad. For one, you're not being specific. As writers, we should strive to be specific, and you telling me I'm great is either disregarded by me as false information, or regarded and then dismissed as something nice, but not particularly relevent.

Encouragement, on the other hand, is complimenting the work. So if I say, "You're great at organizing your stories," then that would be encouragement. Why? Because it confirms that, yes, I am good at something and it makes me want proud of organizing my stories. So, even if my story is absolute crap, I know at least I did something right, which will make me happy.

So remember: praise = bad. Be encouraging instead.
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Sun Dec 03, 2006 6:25 am
Incandescence says...



Snoink--


This is sort of an ongoing struggle.

We're not an affirmation board. We are a writing board--nothing more, nothing less. We are, in a sense, all desperately trying to be relevant and failing on more accounts than a personal level.

Why do we have to explicitly say what a writer did well? If your answer involves anything to do with their "feelings," I simply don't care. Give me a real argument--quit hiding behind this visage of being everybody's emotional cheerleader.


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Brad
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Sun Dec 03, 2006 6:34 am
Snoink says...



Brad--


I still maintain that you are being very silly. Even you tell the poet what part (if any) is salvagable. ;)


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Snoink
Ubi caritas est vera, Deus ibi est.

"The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly." ~ Richard Bach

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Sun Dec 03, 2006 6:53 am
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Incandescence says...



Snoinkuddy--


Relevance? It's not that I think you've said something false--I'm just wondering how your response exactly addresses the issues in my first post.

I assume you're trying to insinuate that I am not totally negative, that I do "encourage," in some sense? I don't think that constitutes a reason for why we should encourage, though.

Interesting.


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Brad
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Sun Dec 03, 2006 8:17 am
Griffinkeeper says...



Even though this is a writing site, it is also a writing site for young and aspiring writers.

As such, we want them to develop into better authors. Encouragement can give young authors the drive to improve.

Reviewers need to have a healthy balance of encouragement with criticism, otherwise they end up crushing a young author instead of helping them.
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Sat Dec 09, 2006 2:56 am
lillizard says...



Ican, there is a balance. I'm sorry, but I can honestly say that your the meanest critiquer on this site. I mean I'm not a very good writer, and all, but seriously, take a chill pill...

I check out the last three poems pandoraswritings did. You made her quit YWS. She will never come back because of what you said about her work. Some people aren't as good at writing as you, but that doesn't give you the right to crush their work. Three stait poems of hers to told her was garbage. Three. She made a good-bye thread, and quit YWS. You've really got to calm down on the critiques. When they are too harsh, they kind of lose their helpfulness and just become an insult. I am just stating my opinion, so please do not critisize me for that.
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Sat Dec 09, 2006 5:40 am
Incandescence says...



Grif & lillizard:


I was unaware we are also a site for emotional counseling. The site is here for young writers to congregate--this is obvious. What is not so obvious is that we have lost sight of writing for the sake of the author.

Oftentimes, people think being hard in a review causes younger writers to give up writing; I have seen no such evidence. At most, it causes a writer to leave a certain website.

But just because a user does not feel the environment here is appropriate for their works does not mean we should sacrifice our own integrity and honesty to conform to what they want. There are other websites for writers to frequent--we are not an isolated colony--and if they feel their cause in writing is better served elsewhere, why should we be held accountable for their decision?

Being a writer is tough. There are millions of writers in the world, and each has his or her own unique voice and perspective to offer to others. Injecting our voice and responses to a piece is the purpose of a workshop. I am not willing to compromise my voice for the sake of making somebody feel good.


All the best,
Brad
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Sat Dec 09, 2006 3:06 pm
backgroundbob says...



I'm with Incan; honesty is the best policy. Some poems just don't have anything to applaud, and there are those of us who aren't in the habit of making up "points for effort" just to have something positive to say.

Where I differ from Brad is probably the level I'm working at; perhaps I expect less and therefore applaud more than he does. Each to their own; there are poems I just don't have single honestly good thing to say about, and I'm sure Brad finds exactly the same kind, albeit different ones.
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Sat Dec 09, 2006 3:26 pm
Sureal says...



I find it helps to know what you're doing right, just as it helps to know what you're doing wrong. A writer needs to know what their strengths and weaknesses are.

I will argue in respect to people's feeling also - there is no point giving a crit to help them, if all you do is put them off writing. I will happily take whatever you have to say on my own work, but it isn't the same with everyone.

When I first started writing, I didn't want people to crit overly harsh - I wasn't writing at a professional level (far from it), I used cliches and... well, my writing was just terrible. However, I didn't need people to come and say, 'this story is terrible,' - of course it was, I was thirteen and had only just started to learn to write. I actually recieved nothing but encouragement (that's right - no crits at all), and yet my writing still improved. I wrote stories for the fun of it. I didn't need people to come out and crit it as though I was trying to achieve a professional level.

This doesn't mean you have to lie to a person - you don't have to make up good things up about their work. However, for the level they (not you) are working at, there is always something they're doing that is better then the other aspects of their work (even if you - and many other writer's - do far better).
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Sun Dec 10, 2006 12:06 am
Incandescence says...



Sureal,


A critic's role is not to offer support. It is to point out where a piece needs work and, if the critic so pleases, how that might be accomplished.

The YWS is simultaneously a review board and a workshop. Some users find it is best to keep the author's emotions in perspective; others place the work as the primary subject for response. Whichever you choose is a matter of personal taste and level of comfort, but neither of them is wrong--and it's even worse that certain users here find methods of responding totally in the wrong.

I apologize for my own defensiveness when it comes to these issues. It is not that I am implying alternative methods of response are invalid or inferior; it is that I fear losing the ability to respond to pieces in the way I am comfortable doing so.


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Brad
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Sun Dec 10, 2006 2:55 am
Snoink says...



Incandescence wrote:Sureal,


A critic's role is not to offer support. It is to point out where a piece needs work and, if the critic so pleases, how that might be accomplished.

The YWS is simultaneously a review board and a workshop. Some users find it is best to keep the author's emotions in perspective; others place the work as the primary subject for response. Whichever you choose is a matter of personal taste and level of comfort, but neither of them is wrong--and it's even worse that certain users here find methods of responding totally in the wrong.

I apologize for my own defensiveness when it comes to these issues. It is not that I am implying alternative methods of response are invalid or inferior; it is that I fear losing the ability to respond to pieces in the way I am comfortable doing so.


Thanks,
Brad


Fortunately, we are not critics. Critics exist for published work, fortunately enough for us. We are mentors.

Also, please don't flame or even ATTEMPT to flame in this thread. The purpose of this thread was not to single out anybody -- in fact, quite the opposite. It was just to point out that pointing things out is better than saying, "Wow! This was great!"

Also, Braddums, I think we all know your point by now. ;) You don't have to repeat it in sixteen different threads at once.
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Sun Dec 10, 2006 2:57 am
Sponson Light says...



Griffinkeeper wrote:Even though this is a writing site, it is also a writing site for young and aspiring writers.

As such, we want them to develop into better authors. Encouragement can give young authors the drive to improve.

Reviewers need to have a healthy balance of encouragement with criticism, otherwise they end up crushing a young author instead of helping them.


Crushing? How? Going into this, a person should understand that they have flaws. Years from now, they should still understand they have flaws, they should always understand they have flaws.
How can pointing out a flaw (or many) be "crushing"? Unless you point out every single flaw to the extent that it is now a list, it is all they often need to improve.

Example (A drawing crit to me from someone else), "Your heads are out of proportion.", from this, I study my work, and I reference, and I understand that they are too BIG in proportion to the rest of the body, and Ill go about correcting this flaw. If you truely want to improve, you are to learn for yourself, not have someone feed it to you.

If we say "Your work is like a PoS and I feel like vomiting after reading it.", yeah, crushing is then a word too soft.

To praise is NOT bad. If you earn a degree from college, you deserve praise. Should you spend the rest of your life being praised for that one thing? No, you are praised for that instant, and then you move on.

If a martial artist finally learns how to execute a mechanically correct kick, they should be praised. If years down the line, that kick is the same as it was years ago, should it still be praised? Probably not, because there should have been improvement. Remember, correct is merely an area which is acceptable. To meet the minimum criteria for success.

If you want to be specific, be specific about your specifics, like I had pointed out in the criticising thread in Squills. "You're great at organizing your stories,", should instead be, "You're great at organizing your stories through the way that your characters interact." Otherwise, I find that "organizing your stories," to be extremely vague too. Great, HOW am I doing that right? Now thats an encouragement. Anything less to me would be a compliment. Useless and still very broad. Anyone can say my work sucks, or my work is good, but can anyone say specifically why?

If youre going to graph, you need both the X and Y coords, otherwise, you're lost as hell. Throwing a line in the general X direction won't help anyone.

If you just starting drawing something and someone said "Wow, you drew that person so nicely,", how exactly did you draw it nicely? VAGUETRONSAUCE.
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Sun Dec 10, 2006 3:51 am
Incandescence says...



Snoinkums--


Fortunately, we are not critics. Critics exist for published work, fortunately enough for us. We are mentors.


And this is why I have "repeat[ed] it in sixteen different threads at once": you are trying to suppress a method for reviewing without any evident basis other than "it makes them feel good." That multiple moderators posted on this very topic in rapid succession--all biased to the same method--only makes my reasoning for responding in each thread more valid. Each time, I have asked for reasons that extend beyond the navel of the users, and each time, your response, particularly, Snoink, has been that I'm being silly, blowing things out of proportion, whatever.

I was under the impression that as a writing website we are trying to help users prepare for professional writing. Am I wrong here? If I'm not, then we are not just mentors--critics are needed as well. If I am wrong, then perhaps the YWS needs to be more open about its explicit intents--this would keep users such as myself, who value critique (as opposed to review), from wasting our time here.

Also, please don't flame or even ATTEMPT to flame in this thread. The purpose of this thread was not to single out anybody -- in fact, quite the opposite. It was just to point out that pointing things out is better than saying, "Wow! This was great!"


Point taken; still, your fundamental claim implicit in the article is that encouragement is the best route. You should be willing to defend that claim with actual reasons--not just whimsical posts with ad hominem attacks.

Also, Braddums, I think we all know your point by now. Wink You don't have to repeat it in sixteen different threads at once.


Point taken.


Best,
Brad
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Tue Dec 12, 2006 6:12 pm
Unrecompensed says...



Incan, if you choose to critique something, you must be doing so with a want to help. If there's a chance of demoralising the writer, and doing more harm than good (which there is a strong chance of, considering most writers are beginners), why bother at all?

Why do we have to explicitly say what a writer did well? If your answer involves anything to do with their "feelings," I simply don't care. Give me a real argument--quit hiding behind this visage of being everybody's emotional cheerleader

There is a much reason to point out what a writer has done well as there is for what he has done poorly. It's a great help to point out the strengths of a piece so a writer can for one, grow in confidence, and two, know to do it again. If you leave it out to maintain a harsh reputation (which I'm strongly suspecting) or for any other intangible reason, shame on you.


I do think that sacrificing a good critique because of the feelings of the writer is a bad thing. Be firm in what you say and don't sugar coat things. But it's just as bad to coat things with shit.

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Tue Dec 12, 2006 7:02 pm
backgroundbob says...



The point is that there are times when saying "the grammar and punctuation was done well" just doesn't do justice to the horrific nature of the piece as a whole; a lot of the time, when we say "get rid of it, there's nothing worth salvaging" that's exactly what we mean, no holds barred. Why should I or anyone else care about your use of commas? You're not going to keep that when you throw the rest out; we've mentioned what needs improving, and that's what should be improved for next time. Anything not mentioned can be assumed to be OK.

Just as nitpicking over grammatical oddities in Huxley's masterpiece "Brave New World" (errors which he mentioned there were many of) simply doesn't represent how good the overall piece is, so sometimes saying "well done" for a lack of spelling mistakes just doesn't fit in with exactly how much the piece needs to be ripped up and abandonned.
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