Week 8 Comments and Feedback

Overall, I've found everybody's comments helpful. While I may not always agree with certain stylistic comments, I appreciate getting to hear different points of view on my work, because sometimes it is so hard to see past our own mental blocks when reviewing our own work. That's something that happens to me in my research papers for my grad classes, too, so it's nice to have this setting where I can hear different perspectives on my fiction work. I find that the more specific the comments, especially in terms of my weak areas, the more helpful they are.

I think in my own comments on other peoples' work, I could be more constructive. I always try to fill my comments with positives, because I genuinely like my classmates' stories, and also because I don't want to offend anyone. But we're here to learn from each other, and if I have a question or a concern with something, I should be more confident to identify that to them. Reading other people's' writing has given me some ideas for new storytelling styles, and in the next half of this semester, I'd like to be a little braver and try some of those different styles.

I find myself going back to a few of the same blogs, and the more that I do, the more I feel like I get a sense of who those people are. I noticed a couple of people regularly commenting on my stories, and I tried to go to their blogs to give them some comments back, and found myself really liking their stories, so much that I kept returning to them. These blogs really do give us a space to show our personalities and explore skills we might not have otherwise tried learning, depending on our majors and career goals.

Going forward, I'd like to feel more confident offering up constructive comments. For the most part, I've been too worried about upsetting people to really try and help them, and I'd like to be able to give back some of the help I've received from my classmates.

Giving Constructive Feedback (Source: Jenn Gibbs' Invisible Sun)