Quality I – Critiques

1. Do not give out your first drafts. Do at least one complete revision before submitting it to someone else.

2. Use family members with caution. Because they know you well, relatives may have difficulty critiquing what is on the page, but may instead bring irrelevant knowledge about you into the feedback. They may be too close to be honest or overly critical without realizing it. This is not a hard and fast rule, as some husbands and wives or mothers and sons critique each other effectively. It’s just a caution.

3. Give your reader some idea of what will be most helpful. That depends on whether the story is in an early stage (needs overall comments about plot, characters, issues with pacing, tone, believability) or an an almost-finished stage (needs line editing – grammar, typos, spelling, suggestions for tightening and improving awkward sentence structure).

Once you get your critique back, then the real work of building quality begins.

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