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No matter how productively you managed to get words down on paper or how carefully you have revised, no matter how shrewdly you figured your audience and purpose and suited your words to them, there comes the time when you need feedback. Perhaps you need it for the sake of revising: you have a very important piece of writing and you need to find out which parts work and which parts don't so you can rewrite it carefully before giving it to the real audience. Or perhaps you have already given an important piece to the real audience -- it's too late for any revising -- but nevertheless you need to learn how your words worked on the reader. Or perhaps you've simply decided that you must start learning in general about the effectiveness of writing. Some people don't need to be encouraged to seek feedback; indeed, they need to be restrained. TO some of you, that is, I would like to say, "Stop worrying so much about how your words work, about how good they are; just keep your mind on your writing, have fun, get confident, write lots." In short, if you are a compulsive worrier and keep leaking your attention away from what you Are doing to how well you are doing it, forget about feedback till you have done enough writing and sharing and feel more secure. But some of you need to be encouraged to get feedback. Probably you have been burned in the past. Most people experience feedback as painful, however they get it. After all, getting feedback on an early draft usually means getting criticized before you've had a chance to make your piece as good as you can make it. But getting feedback on a final draft feels even worse because you are usually getting criticized for your very best work, and besides, you are so tired of working on it by now that you can't even bear to look at it any more. If you follow the suggestions I give in this section, however, getting feedback can be a useful and gratifying experience.It's easy to know when you should start getting feedback. Just keep in mind what's, more important than what: writing is more important than sharing your writing with readers; and sharing your writing with readers is more important than getting feedback from them. That is, if sharing begins to stop you from writing, then don't share. And if getting feedback begins to stop you from writing or sharing, then stop getting feedback. Writing is what's most important. But when you can share and get feedback without hampering your writing, then you will benefit enormously from those two activities.It may be that getting feedback has been hampering you more than it needs to. For if you use the approach suggested here you can avoid the most common problems in getting feedback: people beating around the bush and not telling you anything at all; or giving you a vague wholistic judgment such as "B-plus" or "I liked it"; or going into a negative gear and "critiquing" you by finding every single real and imaginable mistake there could be ("I hope I didn't discourage you or anything"); or else trying to imitate what they remember getting from their teachers and talking about nothing but "topic sentences"; or else grabbing it out of your hands and trying to rewrite the whole thing the way they think it ought to be; or else just telling you everything your writing reminds them of.The four chapters of this section help you take charge of the feedback process by showing you the options you have and then providing you the tools you need.
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