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Despite all those strengths of criterion-based feedback, I find reader-based feedback even more useful. If you neglect readerbased feedback, you will miss many of the main advantages and pleasures of the whole feedback process. Besides, readers often hide their own reactions behind criterionbased judgments about, say, paragraphs, the digressions, the diction. They don't feel comfortable saying, "I was bored after the first couple of pages" or "Actually I sort of felt you were badgering me and talking down to me" or "Somehow I found myself disagreeing with you more at the end than I had at the beginning but I didn't know why."
| • | Reader-based feedback gives you the main thing you need to improve your writing: the experience of what it felt like for readers as they were reading your words. In the long run you get more out of taking a ride inside your reader's skin than you get from a precise diagnosis of the strengths and weaknesses of your writing. That precise diagnosis can be surprisingly useless in actually helping you to change the way you write. It may even paralyze you. |
People are nervous about saying these things because they can't explain or justify them. Yet such felt reactions are often just what you need for improving your writing, especially if you can get the reader to tell you a bit more about where and why they arose. | Reader-based feedback is the most trustworthy feedback because you are only asking for "raw data" -- what they saw and what was happening to them as they read. With criterion-based feedback, on the other hand, you are asking them to translate those perceptions and reactions into a judgment about what is good or bad in the writing. That act of translation is tricky. It takes an experienced reader to translate his discomfort or annoyance into an accurate statement of what's wrong with your logic or diction. He may tell you "too many digressions," for example, or "too many generalizations," but perhaps the essential thing is that you didn't get him to be a cooperative reader. If you had, he wouldn't have complained about the digressions, indeed he would have seen them as integral to your argument. And even if you fix the digressions, he'll probably stay irritated and uncooperative and find something else to complain about. And all the while, you never learn the essential point: some tone or stance in your writing made him irritated and uncooperative. If, on the other hand, you can enter into his reactions and feel his irritation in those very words which you thought were perfectly straightforward and well-mannered -- if you can learn to experience your words as he experiences them -- you can usually find a way to translate all that into practical action: you can decide whether a change is needed (or whether his reaction was peculiar) and what kind of change will fix that irritation. | Therefore, reader-based feedback has the advantage of keeping you more in charge of the whole feedback process. Readers get to tell you what they saw and what happened in them, but you take over from there. You do all the translating. You get to decide what their reactions mean and what changes if any you want to make. One of the main reasons so many people hate feedback or fail to learn from it is that it makes them feel so helpless. Getting feedback has always felt like putting themselves entirely into someone else's power. You don't do that if you use reader-based feedback. (Of course, there are times when you are busy and tired and have great faith in your reader, so you say, "Don't bother me with your reactions, just tell me what's wrong and how to fix it.") ing you more in charge of the whole feedback process. Readers get to tell you what they saw and what happened in them, but you take over from there. You do all the translating. You get to decide what their reactions mean and what changes if any you want to make. One of the main reasons so many people hate feedback or fail to learn from it is that it makes them feel so helpless. Getting feedback has always felt like putting themselves entirely into someone else's power. You don't do that if you use reader-based feedback. (Of course, there are times when you are busy and tired and have great faith in your reader, so you say, "Don't bother me with your reactions, just tell me what's wrong and how to fix it.") to be a statement of bow your words didn't quite measure up. It's hard not to be defensive and to argue against it: "Well, you may not think that's a proper introduction, but you just have a rigid, simpleminded notion of what an opening paragraph ought to be like." With reader-based feedback there is seldom anything to argue about. You can't say, "I disagree. You were not confused during that opening paragraph." And even if you think he was stupid to be confused, your act of simply listening and seeing it through his eyes will probably lead you to improve that first paragraph. The main thing people feel when they first learn to get readerbased feedback is an enormous sense of relief that value judgments and "measuring-up" are not the focus of every statement. It's an exhilarating experience when, as sometimes happens, you get a rich set of reactions to a piece of your writing -- you are getting good insights and taking notes like mad as you listen to this person tell you his reactions -- and then it is all over and you start to listen to the next person give you feedback and suddenly it hits you: "Hey! I don't even know whether he liked it or not," Suddenly that tyrannical matter of liking and not-liking pales into its notvery-significant place. Of course you often do get value judgments in reader-based feedback since liking or not liking is likely to be one of the events in the reader. But it's only one of the events and usually not the most important one. And it's easier to accept a value judgment and learn from it when it consists of a statement of how the reader is bothered or put off or made uncomfortable by your words than when it consists of a statement of how your writing doesn't measure up to some criterion. | In this sense, then, reader-based feedback is the most efficient kind of feedback: it can lead to the fastest and most pervasive improvement. It is more apt to speak to the root causes of strength and weakness in your writing, not just the surface effects. That is, if you ask for reader-based feedback you are apt to hear things like this: "Damn it, stop beating around the bush and come out and say what's on your mind. Stop working so hard at fending off my possible disagreements. Just write what you have to say. Your constant defending is making it harder for me as a reader just to follow your thoughts comfortably, in fact it's making me angry." Think how much more useful it is to hear that than to hear someone say "It's | | too long and wordy, too many dependent clauses, try for simpler syntax and a clearer progression of logic." Once a reader helps you hear a note of insecure beating around the bush in your own writing voice, you can strengthen your writing much more quickly and pervasively than if he just told you to get rid of dependent clauses and use simpler diction and better logic. Reader-based feedback gives you someone saying "I get annoyed and don't take your argument seriously because I always hear a kind of whine in your voice," instead of someone saying "too many passive verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Not enough crisp verbs of action. Your diction isn't lively or energetic." (I'm not saying you can get rid of a habit of voice overnight once you hear it. Since it is a habit it will slip out again and again in speaking and freewriting. Indeed, now that you realize a whine is there you ought to invite it out as much as you can in freewriting -- to exaggerate it, play with it, get a better feeling for it, and see what it is trying to tell you. This will improve your ability to remove it when you revise -- and gradually to grow out of it.) Reader-based feedback gives you someone saying, "I get mad at you when I read this because I feel you being arrogant and snotty. You just ski as fast as you can and you don't give a damn whether I fall down or not as I try to follow you. You never even look back." Most of the time that kind of reaction helps you more than "Too many abrupt changes, too few clear transitions, too many abstractions without illustration, and even when you do give illustrations they are not obvious ones." I'm not saying that the reader is always correct in his picture of you. Even though he is intimidated by you, you may not in fact be writing in an arrogant or snotty way, just having a good time enjoying your own powers -- skiing fast because you have fun skiing fast. But you can often improve your writing more quickly and easily when you realize how it feels to a reader, even if that reader is making an incorrect judgment about you, than if you were given entirely correct statements about your syntax or paragraph transitions.
Reader-based feedback is especially necessary for poetry, fiction, and other kinds of creative writing. There are so many different ways in which poems or stories can succeed -- or fail -- that it's impossible to spell out a list of specific criteria for them. Indeed I am nervous about having you depend too much on my list of criterion-based questions even for nonfiction or expository writ | | ing. It's a safe list. Most teachers would agree with most items. But many successful pieces of nonfiction fail to meet some of these criteria, for example, they digress or they are hard to read or they have peculiar paragraphing. And many unsuccessful pieces measure up well on most criteria, but fail to have that certain something that makes them succeed with readers. |
Summary I can summarize the complementary virtues of the two kinds of feedback by pointing out that criterion-based feedback forces criteria to be conscious and reader-based feedback allows criteria to remain unconscious. Conscious criteria help readers notice things they would miss if they just gave themselves over to natural or habitual reading. But these conscious criteria can also be a screen between readers and your words -- a filter which keeps readers from contacting and experiencing your words directly -- leading them instead just to compare your words to a model, hold them up against a template, check off categories on a list. Amateur readers, in particular, sometimes go into a peculiar gear when you ask them for criterion-based feedback. They don't just read the way they would normally read. They say to themselves, "Well, now I've got to give help on writing, let's see, I've got to be on the lookout for faults, now let's see what should I look for, good organization, spelling and grammar of course, that's important, paragraphing, yes, that's what my teachers stressed a lot. Tone. I had this terrific teacher who talked about tone all the time, but I never did figure out what he meant. And not too many adjectives; not too many long sentences." Readers can't tell you much about your writing when they have all that noise in their heads. Reader-based feedback, on the other hand, by allowing criteria to remain unconscious, yields just the opposite virtues and defects. It allows readers just to relax and read your writing for enlightenment or pleasure, and to experience it on its own terms. It allows them to notice and react to more qualities in it than they could consciously analyze, and it allows them to be more sensitive to nuances -- especially matters of tone and presentation of self that are difficult to categorize but often determine success or failure. Leaving criteria unconscious, however, can also permit narrow reading: reading that is a slave to one or two unconscious criteria for example, how a reader feels about the tone of voice or the "vibes." In short, the two kinds of feedback encourage readers to take different roles. When you ask a reader to give you criterion-based feedback you encourage him to function like an expert, a coach, or a commentator, that is, to stand off to the side and watch you from the stage wings as you give your violin concert and not get too involved in your music. This helps him to tell you about your technique. When you ask your reader to give you reader-based feedback, on the other hand, you encourage him to function like an audience, that is, to sit right out there in front of you and experience your music. This helps him to tell you about what your music does to the audience. The moral of the story, then, is to use both kinds of feedback. I present criterion-based feedback first here because it is more familiar and easier to understand, but generally you do better to ask for reader-based feedback first. That way readers can just read for pleasure or enlightenment and tell you about whatever happens to them when they read in their accustomed way -- before you make them into more self-conscious and technique-oriented readers by asking them criterion-based questions. |
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