Exit (Feedback) Strategies

Meme I made
When it comes to feedback, the quality of it is key. There's a wide array of types and flavors, and not all are useful to the person receiving it. This week I read How to Give Students Specific Feedback That Actually Helps Them Learn and How to Craft Constructive Feedback. They focused on how to give good feedback- observe, describe, suggest. Which, to be honest was just how I thought you gave feedback. You let them know what you are seeing from the page, then let them know how you think that affects the character or how the work is doing, and then you suggest a way to resolve it. You tell someone what they're doing well so they can know what works, let them know what you got from it in case it came across all wrong, and suggest areas that could be improved upon in a kind way. Like "I think the setting could use a little work here" "there isn't really a sense of space to make your dialogue go to the net level". Basically, I was though to make a criticism sandwich- thing they are good at, thing to work on, thing that would be even better with that improvement. 
I actually feel pretty confident giving constructive feedback on writing, mostly because I've been doing it most of my life. My mom is a writer and has a lot of friends who are authors. Over the course of my life, some of her friends have had me read books targeted at my age demographic- middle grade or young adult at the time- and give them feedback. I have also been around conversations about writing that whole time also. I know all the key phrases- "show, don't tell" "show the universal through the specific" "but what's the motivation" "the voice of the main character needs to be fully fleshed out"- and can actually use them correctly. In other areas, yeah, not that confident. But this, I have trained for this, I have been paid for this (like five dollars a chapter, but I was in middle school so that was a lot of money). Basically, I can edit well, and hopefully that will translate into this project as well.

Comments

  1. That is awesome to hear that you've basically been editing your entire life! I think that speaks to how important it is to have a community of readers and wrtiers around to help people with their own writing, which is one of the reasons that I'm particularly thankful for this class! Even now, I'd totally get $5/chapter to read a book.

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