Feedback and Critique

I think I am as good at offering criticism as any other student in this course. Most of the students have taken an AP English course, including myself; therefore we all have a good foundation regarding reading and writing. My English course had timed writings every week on prompts we wouldn’t know about until the day of the assignment. After we would write these papers we would edit them either in pairs, groups, or as a class. This practice has definitely helped me for doing peer reviews now and makes me somewhat qualified to give criticism. I don’t know what good constructive criticism looks like. I have just finished reading the peer reviews for my own paper and think all of the remarks are educational and helpful. The reason I say I can’t recognize constructive criticism is because a few of my classmates have stated opposite opinions about certain parts of my essay. One person argues that certain sentences are strong while another says the same sentence is unnecessary in my paper. Those are two very opposite opinions but when I hear their reasoning’s I agree with both. This obviously makes me a little rocky in the comprehension of criticism, be it positive or negative.

I believe I can produce good criticism; as good as any other student in the course. I believe that I have had lots of practice throughout high school which has helped me understand how to give criticism without offending the writer. Then again, many other students in this course could have taken an intense English class in high school as well giving them just as much experience. The trick is to include a positive comment for every two negative comments when reviewing another person’s paper. That way you get all the problems discussed and fix while adding in a positive phrases to show that you still have a high opinion of the work. I have been given a lot of critique throughout my history of writing and I don’t think I could pinpoint any one statement that truly changed y writing. Each critique has been extremely helpful for what I was working on at the moment but never stays in my memory past the assignments due date. If I had to choose a critique it would be something my 11th grade English teacher told me. I was never good a spelling and I’m still pretty bad (thank goodness for spell-check) and this teacher noticed this in my essays right away. I always tried to impress her with big vocabulary words but I never knew how to spell them so I just sounded it out and made an educated guess. Well she took me aside one day and said “Ashley, if you don’t know how to spell something don’t use it in your writing. Only use words you are confident with.” I realized that using high vocabulary in an essay will only make your writing sound more sophisticated if you spell them correctly. I still use that advice today.