Giving Feedback

I’ve been thinking about writing feedback lately. This is interesting to me for several reasons. First, as a writing consultant, I get paid to give feedback. I love what I do, and it helps to inform my research, too. Secondly, next week we start workshopping poems in my poetry class, which totally freaks me out. I had to take either poetry or fiction and both scare the crap out of me—ultimately I decided poetry freaks me out less. But I’ve never workshopped that sort of writing before, and I’ve heard horror stories from my creative writing friends, so I’m sufficiently apprehensive. Finally, I was thinking about all the wonderful field essays we’ve heard over the past few class periods, and I was thinking about what feedback I have for them. 

Anyway, I’m always interested in other writers’ work. I love seeing the ways we think both alike and differently. Oftentimes I find myself desperately wanting a writer to take their piece a certain way because I’m so interested in hearing what they have to say, or because it’s a topic I am already interested in, or even because they are writing about something I’ve been too scared to. Whatever the case, I find that I constantly have to keep myself in check. 

To me, words have a lot of power, and even small words have the ability to change the way the intended audience can respond. For example, a word like “should” is tricky, as is the phrase “need to.” I always rebel a bit inside when someone says I “should” or “need to” do something. So I try to say things like “could” or “might.” Honestly, I have no idea if others feel the same way about these words, but it’s something I watch like a hawk—even when I’m all caught up yammering in class or at a writer in the Writing Center. “You could do ________,” I might say. Or, even, “you might think about doing__________.” It’s sort of a rhetorical device that I employ in order to avoid alienating my audience. And, ultimately, whatever the piece of writing is, I have absolutely no say in what it should look like. The writer has to make that decision—and that’s kind of a terrible burden we writers have. Do I write this even though my audience might prefer that? It’s a weird sort of dance writers have to do. Last semester I worked incredibly hard on a piece and found that I was overly attached to certain sentences that my readers suggested I cut. My classmates and I joked that we should make a “sentence graveyard” for those that we loved so much but knew we had to eliminate. 

My point is, I guess, I hope to always be empathetic to the writers whose work I read. I often feel really honored that people share their work with me—even if it’s because it’s required in class or they have a required Writing Center visit. Giving feedback is fun and can be super beneficial even to readers as it helps us think about our own writing differently, or we learn new things, or we gain inspiration. But we have a big responsibility to the writers. I hope I can always remember that.