Feedback Strategies: What There Is, Not What There Isn't

One problem with feedback is that it feels personal, especially negative feedback. One trend in feedback giving is to make "a feedback sandwich" with positive comments before and after the critique. However, people who receive feedback sandwiches may see the positive parts as a measly way to soften the blow. As a result, they will dread getting feedback more than they did before.

This dread is a problem because feedback, whether it is self-reflection or a progress report, is vital to improvement. The article, Try Feedforward Instead of Feedback, by Marshall Goldsmith, mentions one feedback technique is to focus on solutions for the future without nitpicking every specific problem.

If you notice one story has a lot of typos, you don't need to say "you spelled the has teh twice." Instead, we can give tools are each other to use in our future writing endeavors. One tool that I would recommend to anyone is Grammarly, which if you haven't used it, it helps me a lot with the word count, word usage, and spelling

Gravity Goldberg's article, Be a Mirror: Give Readers Feedback That Fosters a Growth Mindset, also gave useful tips on how to provide feedback. The most important advice was about acknowledging what is there not what is missing.

I feel this is especially important in a class with storytelling because what makes a good story is very subjective. We all have some retelling in our minds from the stories we've read. If we picture our retelling idea while reading a classmate's, we ignore their strengths.

If you enjoy the emotional part of a story a lot more than the action part, you can provide feedback that isn't a criticism of their action writing.

One example of a lousy critique is, "your story would have been better if you stuck to the character's emotion." Instead, you can focus on what they wrote and say, "the way you expressed the character's emotions with actions was incredibly vivid ." It is also essential to be specific. Perhaps you can bring up memorable parts of the story. An example of this could include, "your inclusion of 'she tilted her head' was a great way to convey that she was confused."

This type of comment tells the writer a highlight you saw in their writing without adding complaints about how other parts were bland compared to what you liked. Because storytelling, like any subjective, plot elements you disliked may be fantastic to another person.

Overall, I think the most crucial thing in feedback is to be heartfelt but not cruel. Don't nitpick a person in a creative space. Instead, we can all work together with giving each other tools to help us succeed without focusing on past mistakes.

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Feedback Thoughts

Like many people, I have struggled with receiving feedback. I took any negative feedback on my work as a direct attack on me as a person. However, I brushed off any positive input to the side. I never saw it as a compliment to me as a person. This double-standard affected me, and it was only later that I realized that my merits are just as significant to pay attention to as my faults. The two articles I read reinforced this thought-process.

One of the articles I read was Sabina Nawaz's article, "Silence the Critical Voices in Your Head." Nawaz brought up that it is crucial to write down both positive and negative feedback, so we know what we need to continue as well as what we need to change. As it is now, we give ourselves too little credit for our merits. We brush off compliments without realizing that every skill we have contributes. To counteract this thought, we need to focus more on positive feedback and turn those compliments into improvement working tools.

John Spencer's article, "Seven Ways to Crush Self-Doubt in Creative Work," also brought up how the way we shrink from making mistakes is unnatural. If babies were self-conscious of how clumsy they are compared to adults, functional humans would cease to exist. We need to shift from the thought process that the worst thing we can do is make a mistake or turn in an imperfect project. The worst thing we can do is nothing. While this mindset is hard to grasp with the standardized testing and continual grading, we need to remind ourselves that by comparing ourselves to others, we are only hindering ourselves.

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