#4 Feedback

After putting in the last period (full-stop) in your piece of writing, the temptation is huge to just be done with it. You’ve made it through to the end! Congratulations. But to write well, and with real confidence in your work, you need to take another (probably painful) step.

If you want your work to really shine - you aren’t quite done. You need to be prepared to subject yourself to ridicule, humiliation or, at the very least, constructive criticism. You need feedback.

How much feedback, and what form it should take, depends on the nature of your writing project. But every writing project, from a simple email to a screenplay for a feature film needs some form of feedback.

Sorry. It’s just part of the process.

It is virtually impossible to sit alone, pecking at your keyboard for a substantial time and retain complete objectivity about your work. After all, all writing is about communicating with an audience. And the best way to suss your audience’s likely reaction is to get some feedback.

Okay. I promised that I would make writing easier, and now I’m telling you to do something hard. But what I’m really offering is a process that will make writing well easier, and writing well demands the extra effort of getting feedback on your early drafts.

Feedback from Yourself

With very simple projects - emails, brief letters, etc - you can get feedback from yourself. All you need to do is give yourself some time away from the project - a little emotional distance - and then look at it from a fresh perspective.

With an email, for instance, I recommend writing a draft, then doing something else for a moment - maybe make a phone call, look something up on the internet or just run to the loo. Anything other than writing that gives you a minute or two to get away from what you’ve written. Then, look at it again. You’ll be surprised how often you find little things to tweak to make it that much better.

If the project is a bit more complicated - a difficult letter, a brief but important report - more time away will give you greater perspective. If you have the time, sleep on it, and look at it again fresh in the morning. Or maybe just put it aside for a while. Go grab some lunch. Get out of the office. Take a walk. Time away from the project will help you look at it more critically and make important changes to improve it.

Feedback from Others

Who gives you feedback is very important. Everyone has an agenda, and you should know their point of view before asking someone to read your work. What you need is an honest audience reaction - as free as possible from specific suggestions or unconstructive criticism. It’s not the reviewer’s job to fix what’s broke, just to point out where it isn’t working.

Spouses can be great, but they usually love you, the poor things, so it may be hard for them to honestly assess your work. I happen to have a wife with an eagle-sharp critical eye and no worries whatsoever about hurting my feelings, so she’s a dynamite editor. If you’re not so lucky, try showing your work to a trusted colleague (not one who’s got her eye on your job), or the friend who wouldn’t hesitate to tell you that, yes, those jeans make your ass look big.

The more important, and the larger, the project the more useful it will be to get feedback from more than one person. If, for instance, you are writing a presentation or a speech, it would be enormously helpful to rehearse it in front of an audience of sympathetic friends. If you have a vital proposal to send out, let several colleagues read through your draft and point out the highs and lows.

Assessing Feedback

Whoever takes the time to give you feedback, it is still up to you to judge its usefulness. As I said, people often have their own agendas, so you need to take all criticism with the proverbial grain of salt. (With some people, you may need a whole salt lick!) My rule of thumb for assessing criticism is if it rings true, it probably is.

When you’ve been concerned that your tone may be a bit harsh, and someone says you ’sound bitchy,’ then they’ve probably hit the nail on the head.

On the other hand, if someone says you should cut out the very sentence you feel carries greatest weight in your argument, you should probably grin and ignore the suggestion.

The main purpose of feedback is not to have others fix your work for you, but to help you gain perspective on what is working well and what isn’t. A little feedback can go a long way in helping you revise a piece of writing that is just ‘okay,’ into something that ‘makes a splash!’