Fine-tune your feedback
Chris Clement-Green featured in a recent WM article about the benefits of mentoring. Now, she follows up with advice for how feedback should best be received, and given.
In the dim and distant past I once worked as a police trainer. The word ‘trainer’ is important as five years earlier, when I had been a raw recruit myself, we sat behind desks and were front-loaded law by ‘an instructor’.
But things had moved on and, as a trainer, it was my job to keep the learning ‘student-centred’ and life relevant. Instead of weekly pass/fail exams, progress was measured by peer and trainer feedback, so this feedback had to be well structured and formal. With experience and hindsight I feel this six-rule structure could, indeed should, be applied to the giving and receiving of creative writing feedback, especially in a workshop environment:
• All feedback must be very specific – ‘good’ or ‘dull’ doesn’t cut it.
• The writer always goes first, stating what was good and not so good about their work. Peer feedback follows and the tutor then fills in any gaps.
• The feedback shouldn’t be personal. This is helped by using the word ‘I’ instead of ‘you’. For example the phrase your main character lacks depth can be seen as attacking the writer. Replacing it with, I feel the main character is a little flat – I need to know what he’s actually thinking when X happens, makes it much harder to argue with someone’s feelings rather than with their opinion.